Comfort level should be a secondary consideration

A couple of things, only tangentially related.

Can we all just agree to stop listening to car owners who tell us they’re “close” to signing a new sponsor for their NASCAR teams?

Look around you, folks. The companies that might be candidates to come into the Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Truck series and bringing millions of dollars with them are far more likely these days to be looking to the government for “sponsorship” to keep them from going belly-up.

These are harrowing times, economically speaking. Unless the criminals in the oil industry decide to come up off some of the billions they’re socking away, it’s hard to imagine anybody writing a $20 million check if that company has not already been of a mind to.

What does that mean for racing?

Teams that want to add cars to their fleets might have to spend more time trying to shore up the deals they’ve already got. Tracks may have to slow down ambitious improvement hopes. It might even mean that a team can’t buy the latest and greatest testing or research and development gizmo just because the team down the street has one.

The truth, though, is that there’s room in the sport for more financially responsible business practices. Maybe teams won’t go somewhere every week to test a car and maybe they’ll discover that they never really had to. Maybe rather than lay people off or cut back on what’s spent to make a car actually go fast, some teams might ask a crew chief or – God forbid – a driver make do in a hotel room and not a $750,000 motor home.

The scary thing for the sport, as a whole, is how all of this is going to impact the people who really pay the bills. Fans have already started having to make tough decisions that are showing up in the form of empty seats in the grandstands. That puts even more pressure than there already was on NASCAR to get the racing right and make its sport something that’s hard for fans not to come see.

That’s sort of where my second point for the day comes in.

There’s been a lot of talk in the past few weeks stemming from what drivers and crew chiefs and car owners have said over their radios. Clips of spirited conversations are played over and over again and talked about on television and radio shows until the topic gets completely worn out.

You can say that race teams should know that people are listening to everything they say. That’s true, but if the driver and crew chief have to start “editing” themselves because they’re worried about what somebody might think of them and their relationship doesn’t that change they way they do their jobs?

It’s gotten to the point that, all things being equal, if I owned a race team I would be thinking about scrambling my team’s communications so people can’t listen in. The problem with that, though, is that NASCAR has packaged the access to those communications as part of the fan experience. The sport can’t afford, literally and figuratively, to allow that to be taken away from the fans.

Imagine how much controversy there would be after a Duke-North Carolina basketball game if fans had access to everything being said in the respective teams’ huddles. If you heard an NFL defensive coach talking to his players when they were down 21-0 in the second quarter, do you think what you hear would be suitable for mixed company?

But NASCAR fans hear all of that and would howl if you took it away. NASCAR and companies it does business with get significant revenue from that access – things like DirecTV’s Hot Pass and Sirius radio’s Driver 2 Crew channels as well as Sprint’s FanView and all of the scanners that are bought or rented at the track.

I think race teams are just going to have to learn to deal with the blowback that sometimes comes with having people listening in as they do their work, the same way that everyone is going to have to learn to do business in the new reality that exists in this economy. It might not be comfortable to do either, but it sure looks necessary.