virtualbalboa
driver of corey day bandwagon since 2022
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2023
- Messages
- 1,176
- Points
- 173
First off, since I know the question is "wHeRe iS tHe mOneY cOmiNg fRoM?": obviously the answer is "NASCAR's cut of it's major revenue streams." They can't both be making so much money that even God would shy away from suing them and also struggling to stay afloat. They have chosen to pocket a lot of cash in lieu of reinvesting it in the sport at large since....Christ...ever? JC France is gonna have to not buy a new Porsche 911 this year from Brumos to drive around intoxicated in. Boohoo. How sad.
#1: If you can't drive a car outside the confines of a race track, you can't drive one inside of it either. We're going back to the days where states had real limits on age and there's actual penalties if you break them. Creating age limits means that Dad can't just pay a half million dollars to drop junior into a CRA Jegs Late Model or that the CRA doesn't get the idea to run another U-15 Late Model Series again. If you want to race karts (up to and including superkarts or winged outlaw karts), that you are permitted to do.
#2: Revenue sharing by the sanctioning bodies change, and most of all, with NASCAR: Instead of the France family buying another yacht, NASCAR vis-a-vis me is working bilaterally with NASCAR-sanctioned local tracks to increase purses and assist with updating infrastructure so that they may be more sustainable moving forwards. Purses haven't increased substantially in decades while costs continued to increase, which makes it fairly natural that the conditions will benefit those who don't intend or care if they break even racing grassroots. This also leads to increasing purses in ARCA, which to my knowledge, hasn't really seen increases since the 90s. I doubt seriously that other sanctioning bodies are rolling around in money given their respective revenue streams, but that's also why NASCAR is uniquely in a trial as being a monopoly.
#3: Since I'm also running the ACCUS as a tyrant, I'm making demands of track operators everywhere. They're going to work with me and thus work together on unified rules packages, especially on the front of tires. There's not going to be 15 classes of 4-cylinder FWD cars in a 90 mile radius because all the tracks are run by retired carnies that can't stand each other and they need to break even on pit passes. I want to know how your finances look and what your strategic plan is moving forwards. If you can't promise me X amount of money to be reinvested into physical plant every year and you won't accept financial assistance with me (that comes with the caveat that you're gonna get consultation about the business I expect you to follow or at minimum listen to and provide a detailed response to), then I wish Copart well on their newest junkyard.
#4: As part of the demands: We're starting a new RWD late model class based on post-Fox Body muscle cars like Dodge Chargers. I know tracks have done this successfully and it's time to move away from racing 1985 Monte Carlos as the standard for a stock car. ACCUS is going to subsidize this because the long term benefits (being able to build a race car from junkyard parts again) far outstrips the short term complications of everyone needing a new car which is why we're in this situation in the first place. If you want to run a G-body stock car, you can wait ten years for a classics division for these, which is where they belong. There's no f'n way people were regularly racing '32 Fords on ovals in the 1980s, so why the hell are we racing 1982 Chevys in the 2020s? madness.
#5: I have absolute power here, right? Then we're capping costs at the class level (we did just unify all those classes in #3!), and if you want to spend over the cap, the consequence is not unlike a luxury tax in the NBA. Except in this case, the funds for the luxury tax are going right into promotion, track reinvestment/reopening, etc. You want to spend ludicrous sums of money so your kid has a rocketship of a Bandolero? Fine, but we're also getting new bathroom stalls this year, reducing the margin on tires, and buying some targeted Facebook ads. When the tobacco money dried up, the next best source was "Wealthy Dad". Wealthy Dad didn't give a damn about whether or not the facilities improved, whether or not the series was promoting itself to new audiences, and whether or not Wealthy Dad's firm actually got any sort of exposure whatsoever was inconsequential compared to the write-off and the fact that the kid wasn't screwing anything up at the Biz/letting Wealthy Dad live vicariously through them. In doing so, Wealthy Dads effectively extracted every dime out of the little guys until the little guys no longer had the will, desire or want to keep racing, mining the grassroots until there is less and less left: just look at all the "Is weekly racing dying?" discourse. Wealthy Dad is giving back now whether he likes it or not.
#6: Expand the reach and scope of Drive For Diversity: If you want racing to resemble the audience of a Morgan Wallen show, then job well done. If you want it to resemble America in the hopes that you can sell something to people who aren't Bro-Country types or Elderly Dale Fans, you need to make karting more accessible, you need to create an actual pathway for sim racing-to-actual cars that doesn't involve having a Wealthy Dad that is able to access the slush fund of an evangelical diploma mill. Best part is that you can actually find sponsors for programs like this and have someone else pay for it if you're serious about it. Even now. Part of this is also going to be having big tests set up like the January ARCA Daytona one where the best talent from around the country gets an opportunity to impress in front of team principals and engineers (hey, that's 2025 racing for you) to show how fast they are heads up in equivalent equipment, preferably somewhere that requires a driver to actually use the brake or throttle control. Every year there should be an NFL Combine like event for these drivers and we should all be glued to see who can turn laps fastest at New Smyrna or whatever.
TL;DR - If you want to improve things at the grassroots level, you need to get tracks to collaborate, you need to modernize the facilities and the cars, you need to get the teams who spend ungodly sums to invest back into the sport and not just into trick exhausts, and you need to provide incentives and opportunities to people who aren't independently uber wealthy to display skill. If you don't want to do those things, you can go out of business (because you are going to go out of business anyways) or you can turn yourself into a club track. I mean, if your business model is that you have 50 paying fans and 300 people paying for pit passes, entry fees, and assigned trailer spots, you've already become a club track in all but name anyhow. There's a million ways to try and do that. Or you can just not give a F and cash the checks, which is what everyone has done for my entire lifespan and will always do. We know racing teams have taken the money and not asked when the checks came from sanctioned governments, payday loan scams, and cocaine smuggling. Why expect different now?
