Last weekend's problem of filling a 43-car field at Rockingham (N.C.), where fillers and has-beens were on the track, should be enough to jolt NASCAR CEO Brian France.
Instead of showcasing the sport's best, NASCAR went to some ridiculous extremes, including letting a guy like Joe Ruttman, a 60-year-old grandfather who hadn't started a Cup race in more than nine years, into the game.
He wasn't in long, of course; not having a pit crew tends to get you red flagged rather quickly. One lap was all it took for Ruttman to get yanked.
Maybe it's just me, but if Ruttman didn't have a pit crew to begin with, why in the world did NASCAR allow him onto the racetrack at all?
And then there was Kirk Shelmerdine, also red flagged just 18 laps after Ruttman for committing one of the biggest sins in motorsports: He was pulled off the track and told to go home for driving too slow.
And, last but not least, there were estimates of as many as 10,000 seats going unfilled in the stands.
That's a good show? No, that's an embarrassment for this league of many riches.
Guys such as Ruttman shouldn't have been in the field to begin with. And then, the topper, Ruttman goes home with more than $54,000 for his one-lap high jinks.
There are a lot of people -- this writer included -- who wouldn't mind taking one lap and going home with that kind of cash. Where do we sign up?
As sad a statement as having guys like Ruttman and Shelmerdine on the racetrack with obviously inferior -- some might even say unsafe -- equipment is, here's an even scarier thought: That same scene could play out several more times this season. In fact, NASCAR is running the risk of making what happened at Rockingham an almost race-to-race occurrence.
The reason is simple: Many smaller teams simply can't afford to pay to play in Nextel Cup competition. With the average per-team budget approaching $20 million per season, NASCAR is pricing itself out of the market for the little guy. Small independent teams simply can't keep up with the well-funded, multi-car operations of the Roushes, Yateses, Gibbses, Penskes, Hendricks and Childresses, unable to have as many as 20 cars to choose from per season, not to mention the high operating costs associated with a 36-race season.
This problem has been building slowly over the last few years. And now, judging by Rockingham, all those problems have come home to roost both quickly and urgently.
Savvy race fans will note that this problem happens in all forms of motorsport. Higher costs invariably drive the little guy out of the picture.
Let's go back to the early 1990s. The same exact thing -- smaller fields, fewer teams and drivers who had no business being on a racetrack -- occurred in the Championship Auto Racing Teams series. Costs rose, and car counts fell.
At its peak, CART wasn't completely unlike NASCAR is today -- at the top of its game in terms of success, popularity, sponsorship, race attendance and monetary income. But the bigger CART became, the more the cash register rang. The cost to operate a team went from a few million to 6-10 million dollars in a few years. And that was not to win a championship but just to be competitive.
By the mid-90s, costs had spiraled so out of control in CART that teams were dropping like flies. American drivers, who had been the staple of the series since it was formed in 1979, quickly gave way to -- some even say they were forced out by -- foreign-born drivers who could bring international sponsorship dollars with them.
At the same time, CART had delusions of grandeur that it could take on Formula One in head-to-head competition, thus prompting the series to begin racing in numerous foreign venues. The world was CART's oyster, and it was going to take a big bite.
Unfortunately, the bills kept getting higher and sponsors started to become scarcer. That deadly formula created a hole in open-wheel racing big enough to drive a Mack truck through. We all know the bitter struggle that open-wheel in America has endured this past decade.
France should be aware of what happened to CART, because no matter how glorious the overall picture looks at the present, things can change in the future when finances get out of control. The cost issue should be a top priority for everyone at NASCAR's Daytona Beach headquarters.
The flip side to the embarrassment at the Rock, of course, is that NASCAR is thriving in most respects.
And, is having a 43-car field really all that important in the grand scheme of things? What's wrong with a 40-car, or maybe even a 36-car starting field? NASCAR has been all across the board regarding field counts in the past, from extremely high to lower than its current 43 standard.
Richard Petty's comments from Daytona were on the mark: The fans won't suffer at all if 40 or even 36 cars were to start next week at Las Vegas or the week after at Atlanta. Fans are not flocking to see Ruttman or Shelmerdine line up.
It could be argued that we might even see closer racing with a smaller field. Frontrunners wouldn't be as likely to be held up on the racetrack if the slower, underfunded cars were limited.
But more than anything, one element about this whole imbroglio that wasn't broached much at Rockingham stands out in my mind. Forget the embarrassment, forget the red-flagging incidents, forget the unfilled seats.
Ever since Dale Earnhardt was tragically killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500 three years ago, NASCAR has made safety its most prominent cause. Losing its figurehead, the driver who embodied the sport, put NASCAR on a fast track toward making sure tragedy of that nature never happened again.
That's why Rockingham was such a convoluted contradiction. In the name of filling the field, NASCAR allowed cars and drivers into the race that shouldn't have been out there simply for the safety risks they presented.
What would have happened if Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart or Dale Earnhardt Jr. were taken out, seriously injured or, God forbid, even killed by a driver or car that was so clearly substandard?
That kind of blind approval to let everyone in -- just to fill the field -- could be something from which NASCAR might never recover.
For that reason alone, what happened at Rockingham must not happen again.
