NASCAR Must Follow The Money

BY ESPN

In January 2003, at the height of NASCAR's westward push, I was sitting two rows behind sanctioning body chairman Bill France Jr., prime real estate to watch the legend as he interrupted his son Brian's first real media question-and-answer session, titled "Realignment 2004 and Beyond." Bill Junior wasn't going to speak. After all, he'd made a big deal out of starting the process of stepping aside and letting his boy take the reins.

But then the topic turned to the selection process of how a limited number of uber-coveted Winston Cup Series race dates would be spread out over the growing roster of new track and markets. Bill Junior couldn't help himself. As the media's questions started circling certain facilities and an impending antitrust lawsuit, I'd watched the back of his neck turn red as he began to fidget in his seat.

He was mad, so he stood and he motioned to the poor kid handling the microphones.

"Brian, let me help you out here," Bill Junior, a future NASCAR Hall of Famer, barked over the speakers. He rambled a bit and then summed it up. "What we're saying is that if an event isn't doing as well as it could and SMI [track ownership group Speedway Motorsports Inc.] wanted to move it somewhere else, then we would entertain that."

He called out four tracks -- Darlington, Rockingham, Atlanta and Charlotte -- for declining attendance, saying he'd been stuck in bed after cancer treatments, forced to watch his races on television.

"If we've got a CEO or vice president of marketing considering sponsoring a car because we've got the hottest sport going, and then I turn on TV and don't see anybody there or see a weak crowd, you've got to ask yourself -- what's so hot about this?"

A few minutes later, after a sorry-not-sorry chat with his heir, Bill Junior held court with media members one on one. As the session broke up, France looked at me, knowing I was at heart a jilted son of Rockingham, a dead track walking, and said, "Sorry, son, these race cars, they gotta follow the money."

That scene and those words were replayed in my mind Wednesday afternoon during a presentation that could have easily been titled "Realignment 2018 and Beyond." In the first significant NASCAR schedule shakeup in years, SMI announced that next season it will move one of its Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series events from the rolling rural hills of New Hampshire Motor Speedway to the neon-tinged desert mountains of Las Vegas Motor Speedway. That race will be joined by New Hampshire's companion Truck Series event as well as what is currently an autumn stand-alone Xfinity Series race at Kentucky Speedway.

Why? Because these race cars, they gotta follow the money. And Vegas, it has plenty of money. More important, they don't mind spending that money. Ask the NHL, which will move to town later this year, or the three college conferences that are playing their tournaments on the Strip this week. Or ask the NFL, which seems to be inching closer to moving the Raiders to Nevada, or the NBA, which can't get Vegas to stop calling, begging to pay for a team to come to town.

Earlier in the week, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the city's Convention and Visitors Authority was willing to commit $2.5 million per year for the next seven years to back a second NASCAR race date to bookend the 1.5-mile speedway's traditional early spring 400-miler. If you haven't been paying a lot of attention to the American motorsports scene over the past few years, allow me to get you up to speed. There aren't nearly as many groups willing to write nearly that large of a check over nearly that length of time as there were back in Bill Junior's day. Certainly not in New Hampshire, where neither of the Magic Mile's 2017 race weekends are sponsored despite the season having already started. Even with good crowds over the years, that lack of revenue and a countryside location that makes it tough for corporate entertainment (80 miles north of Boston) is what has eaten into SMI mogul Bruton Smith's $340 investment in New Hampshire Motor Speedway a decade ago.

That's what ultimately led to SMI's in-house trade that made LVMS a two-race venue and NHMS a one-race venue. Having a second race weekend is awesome and having a NASCAR playoff race is, um, awesomer. But taking three checks to the bank -- $1 million for each race and $500K for marketing -- is the awesomest.

Yes, old school NASCAR fans, I hear your snickers. And yes, I am well aware of how New Hampshire originally earned its second Cup race. In 1996 the track's founder, Bob Bahre, partnered with Bruton Smith to buy the beloved (but antiquated) North Wilkesboro Speedway and split its dates between NHMS and Smith's new Texas Motor Speedway. During the boom days that followed, other "traditional" NASCAR tracks in Rockingham, Darlington, and Atlanta saw their events moved west to Phoenix, Southern California and Kentucky, just as Bill France Jr. had warned that day at the NASCAR R&D Center.

But back then, there were so many more areas of higher ground to run to, and not just in the high desert. When France crashed his son's big moment, he did so with the gusto of a man who'd just inked a new TV deal, working the Nextel/Sprint series sponsorship package, and knowing that International Speedway Corporation, his track ownership arm, was conducting studies in Kansas City, Denver, Seattle and even New York City.

These days are not those days, when phones rang off the hook with cash offers from every corner of the American map. Back then, teams and tracks simply sat back and took orders. Today they are willing to go digging in the Vegas desert like Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie, sure that there's one more jackpot out there to be won.

But the fundamental force behind Wednesday's move is still the same. Now New Hampshire and Kentucky, like so many racetracks before them, will spend their very own once-busy weekends left staring at an empty calendar and empty seats, tuning in to watch their race run somewhere else, and asking, to no one, what happened?

Sorry, son, these race cars, they gotta follow the money.