Motor Sports Weekly News

By: Drew Hierwarter

The rumor mill never sleeps. And with the aid of the internet, some rumors just never seem to die. One in particular that seems to float back up to the surface every once in a while has it that Bruton Smith is going to break away from NASCAR and start his own stock car circuit. Despite the fact that Bruton himself has tried to put this one to bed by stating many times that he has no such plans, like a bad burrito, it just keeps coming back up.

One of the factors that fuels this rumor is that Smith owns seven race tracks that currently host NASCAR Sprint Cup races plus one that doesn’t (Kentucky). If he ran three races on each track that would make a 24 race season, which would probably be enough. But there are many reasons why this is just a bad idea.

First, who would he get to race in this circuit? It’s highly unlikely that the super teams like Hendrick, Roush, Joe Gibbs, DEI, Penske, and Childress would suddenly turn their backs on NASCAR. That leaves smaller teams like Red Bull, The Wood Brothers, Hall of Fame Racing, Robby Gordon, etc. to make up Bruton’s fields. (Provided of course, that they decided to bolt from NASCAR and they may not either.) Without the super stars of the sport you’re not going to fill 100,000+ seats at a place like Bristol or Lowes Motor Speedway. Just look at the truck series. That series produces some of the best racing you’ll find anywhere but without the biggest stars in the sport they only draw crowds of 40,000 to 60,000 fans. The Nationwide Series does better but those races are still drawing only about 80% of what a Cup race draws and that’s only because you have some big name Cup racers in most of the Nationwide fields.

No, without the name drivers like Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Dale Eanrhardt, Jr., etc. Bruton would not get the crowds at his tracks that he does now. And without the crowds you can’t draw the big sponsors, or the big TV deal. Without the money that television has injected into the sport, several of the tracks on the circuit today could not survive. And without the exposure that racing gets on TV, and with the shorter schedule, the race teams can’t demand the big sponsorship money they get from Fortune 500 companies.

So Bruton would be left with races consisting of maybe 25 to 30 cars. Half of which would be driven by guys you never heard of. The other half would be populated by guys who, while talented, have never won; “. . .over in NASCAR”. Or you would get the guys who were big names at one time but are well past their prime now like Bill Elliott, Terry Labonte, etc. Many of the cars would be sub-par equipment prepared on a shoestring budget and sponsored by companies like, “Freddy’s Downtown Used Cars and Aluminum Siding Company”. The margin of victory in most races would be laps instead of fractions of a second as they often are today. In many ways it would be a lot like the senior NASCAR circuit was 50 years ago, which sounds okay on the surface. But remember, nobody in those days was making much money by racing.

Finally Bruton Smith’s own stock car circuit would not have two of the big marquee events like the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400. And his Coca Cola 600 would no doubt suffer in stature as a result of the diminished resources and poor fields.

Bruton Smith didn’t get where he is today by making dumb decisions. And this one would be dumb on a grand scale. Have you ever heard of the CART/IRL split? I guarantee you Bruton has. The nearly 12 year feud between the two Indy car sanctioning bodies nearly killed the sport. Nobody would win if big time stock car racing in America was put in the same position and Bruton Smith is smart enough to know that.