Carl Edwards won the Great Clips 300 at Atlanta Motor Speedway Saturday night after holding off a charging Kyle Busch. The closest Nationwide regular driver was Ricky Stenhouse Junior who came in third but I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the entry lists when the 2012 season rolls around as Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and many other Sprint cup drivers won’t be racing in the Nationwide series nearly as much as you saw this year. Mainly because the sponsorship deals for this season were in place before Nascar Made the announcement about points eligibility for the 2011 season. Next season it may be harder to get sponsorship when the driver isn’t eligible for the points. I said pleasantly surprised, that would be the case if you are against cup drivers coming down to the lower series and taking the first place money home. There seems to be two distinct groups here when it comes to this problem or not a problem as the case may be. Late last year Nascar announced that drivers in all three racing series had to declare which series they were going to be points eligible in. That eliminated Sprint cup drivers from earning points in the lower series but it really didn’t deter the likes of Carl Edwards and Kyle Busch from competing albeit without the points.
Out of twenty six races already run this season only four have been won by Nationwide Regulars, Those four races are divided between three drivers, Ricky Stenhouse Junior (2), Justin Allgaier and Reed Sorenson. Sprint cup drivers have won the rest, with kyle Busch winning seven and Carl Edwards coning in second with six wins. The rest of the cup drivers taking the first place money home were Tony Stewart, Mark Martin, Joey Logano, Brad keselowski, Matt Kenseth, Kurt Busch and Marcos Ambrose. When the times are tough financially, that is a lot of money going home with teams who are far less hurting than some of the Nationwide teams. You hear some of the Nationwide teams saying that they like the cup guys racing with them but that is the drivers talking. For once I would like to hear from some of the nationwide owners and crew chiefs. I wonder what they think about this issue.
I for one think that Nascar is not “All In” with stopping this because there are lobbyists in this sport just like there are in Washington D.C. they are called track owners and event promoters. They are desperate to fill the grand stands and feel that they need the cup drivers there to help in that matter. My opinion is that they are trying to take a series that is better suited to smaller tracks and put it in a venue that is much too large for it. A couple of things are going on here with this series and the truck series. Number one the economy is still in the tank, in my opinion it has never crawled out of the tank all the way. People can not afford to go to all these races, and when they are sitting in the camp ground on a Saturday night Bar B Queuing and drinking beer they are content to do just that. Many people who come to race weekends are there for the social life and party attitude almost as much as the racing itself. If you haven’t been to a Nascar race where there is a campground on site you won’t understand what I mean. Daytona doesn’t count as the only campground on site there is in the infield.
My main experience with this race weekend attitude is with multiple years of going to Talladega. There is a palpable undercurrent aside from the racing that has to do with the social activities at that and many other racetracks. People are content to hang out in the camp ground and party rather than go watch the Nationwide race. I have a solution for this problem. I think they over sold the two lower series in Nascar by trying to put them both in larger venues. I feel if they took the Nationwide series as well as the Nascar Camping World truck series, and take an example from the Iowa Speedway and put these series back in markets that will support them wholeheartedly. Trying to get people near Chicago or any other major population centers to come out to a race is not working. These two series need to be a true traveling series and hit tracks like the Iowa Speedway. Some that come to mind are of Course North Wilkesboro, Rockingham, Five Flags (FL), Gresham (GA), Hawkeye Downs (IA), Illianna (Northern Indiana) and many more to numerous to mention including a myriad of fairgrounds throughout the country. Of course there will be some improvements needed to get a large series into some of these tracks including more grand stands and garage areas. But that is where racing comes from and that is where I think these two series need to go back to.
One major problem with my idea it that one of the main problems that promoters have is how much it costs them in sanctioning fees to host one of these races. I think that there are way too many employees in these two series who are making very nice salaries in a series that cannot support this. The sanctioning bodies need to trim the fat way down in order to get the trucks and Nationwide series into these smaller venues. There is way too much overhead in both these series and that in its self is killing both of them. Nascar is kind of like the U.S. government in the sense that it may know that it is spending too much money but it may never admit it much less do something about it. 15 to 20 thousand fans is about all that you can expect for now and in the very near future at any track that hosts the two lower series. Yea that’s right, you will have to separate those two series from the Sprint cup and send them where people are hungry for racing.
How about trying northern Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Northeast Colorado, and the list of areas that have not been saturated by Sprint cup goes on and on. I don’t know if they will ever fix the problem but I thought that I would voice my opinion on it.
As far as myself, I had a nice three day weekend off for a change; I worked in my garage putting together the beginnings of a shop/man cave. We had some good food, I slept in and then headed out late Monday for a three stop journey through middle Tennessee where it has been raining on me since last night. My left shoe decided to split across the bottom and now every time that I take a step my left foot gets wet. Its gonna be a great day Tater!
Stay Safe
TW
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I had to listen to this race on Sirius satellite radio because for some reason my boss didn’t think that I wanted a three-day weekend like many of our other drivers are enjoying at the moment. I listened to Dave Moody and Mike Bagley call the race from the
turns and there is no better team to listen to in the event that you cannot watch it live. These two guys could make snail racing exciting. At one point in the race last night Kevin Harvick was being pushed by his teammate Clint Bowyer, Harvick got loose and I swear there was a huge wreck coming. But being the driver that he is Kevin got that car under control using most of the track in the process. It was at this point that I thought for sure they were going to have to take the Bag Man to the infield care center for symptoms of a stroke!