Making Mediocrity An Art Form, NASCAR-Style

At last, it's Bristol weekend. Admittedly, my NASCAR viewing is sporadic since I only have the most basic of cable packages, but the half of the Bristol race I watched yesterday (on a streaming feed) was the second time I'd seen live racing on TV since Trevor Bayne crossed the finish line at Daytona. Life is busy. But we all make room for Bristol, because Bristol is one of just three short tracks on the schedule. I'd trade most superspeedways for the claustrophobic bullrings, the tracks Dick Trickle once compared to "flying a jet plane in a gymnasium."

Of course, the critics complain that Bristol has never been the same since they resurfaced it a few years back, trading the one-groove slam-bang concrete for a progressive surface that lets cars race and pass each other without crashing each other out. It's hard to judge any race in which Kyle Busch leads 268 of 300 laps, but I'd still take the Bristol high-banks over next week's California.

What caught my blogging eye this week, though, was a peek through the Nationwide Series standings before the fourth race of the year. My eyes fell on a couple names mired deep in the pack, names who had made all three races, but apparently finished poorly in all of them. They're this year's start-and-parkers.

A start-and-parker, for the casual fan, is a driver who qualifies for a race, sometimes very well, and starts that race. And after a few laps, they return to the garage area, claiming some mechanical problem with the car. The day is done, they collect last-place prize money, and load the car up for next week. Where they might try to race. Or they might just pit for that "vibration" or "brake problem" that slowed them the week before, and the week before that, and a couple weeks before that, too. Start-and-parkers have been around in some form for ages; when there's a short field, teams will sometimes enter a backup car to fill out the field, collecting last-place prize money. It was sort of a win-win; NASCAR got their full field, and a low-budget team collected an extra check. And for some low-budget Cup teams, it was the only way to maintain credit for attempting all the races with a budget big enough for a part-time schedule. There were some exceptions; Joe Nemechek was criticized in 2004 and 2005 for running a full-time start-and-park team with Jeff Fuller, and two ARCA teams ran full-time start-and-park teams in 2001 to pay the tire bills for their primary cars. But as long as fields were full, NASCAR looked the other way.

Then one team came along and made a mockery of the system. In 2008, a new team called MSRP Motorsports filed two Nationwide entries at Daytona. The team was owned by for driver-turned-broadcaster Phil Parsons and Randy Humphrey, but that was all anyone knew; there was no team Web site, and Parsons would shrug off interview questions about his team. The questions were in regards to team performance; Parsons' two full-time teams failed to finish a single race in 2008. It wasn't just bad luck that brought the cars to the garage after five or ten laps week after week with brake or ignition troubles.

Parsons continued the charade in 2009, starting a Cup team (PRiSM Motorsports) to shadow his Nationwide Series operation. The MSRP Nationwide teams combined for two finishes in 2009 and 2010, both races where drivers with sponsorship started the cars; otherwise, they parked in every race, sometimes qualifying just outside the top-ten. The PRiSM Cup team ran about as well, making a full-race effort only when sponsored, and parking before the first pit sequence the rest of the time. After the 2010 season, it was announced that the Cup team would run part-time in 2011, attempting to finish the races. Not a word was said about the Nationwide team, but with the Car of Tomorrow chassis being phased in for 2011, it was doubtful that MSRP would field a new car in 2011. So much for the full-time start-and-park teams, we thought.

Enter Ed Rensi.

Back in the late '90s, former McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi started an ARCA team for young driver Billy Venturini. Venturini was replaced by Jeff Finley, who followed the team to the Busch Series where he was replaced by veteran Kenny Wallace to get the team on track. Bobby Hamilton, Jr. joined the team in 2002, and in 2003 they had a breakthrough season with four victories and a strong fourth-place points run by season's end.

Since then, it's been a struggle. Hamilton went winless in 2004, was replaced by Mike McLaughlin and then Ashton Lewis, then a few other part-time drivers. Hamilton returned to the team in 2008, starting all but two races and scoring only two top-ten finishes all season. In 2009 and 2010, Eric McClure brought some sponsorship money to the team, but ran miserably. In a few years, Team Rensi Motorsports went from one of the most promising Busch-only teams to a backmarker that was dependent upon Hamilton's personal money to finish the 2008 season.

Last year, Kevin Lepage, a Vermont veteran on the downswing of his career, announced he would pilot the Rensi #24 Ford. In the press release, he explained how he was pleased to be racing, not just start-and-parking as he had resorted to since 2008. Rumors had it that Rensi would enter a second car for Kelly Bires, a promising driver whose big chance in one of Dale Jr.'s Chevrolets was cut short twice in 2010, once by sponsorship and then when Tony Eury fired him a few races into the season. Meanwhile, as Eric McClure moved his sponsorship dollars to another team, he lamented how he had rarely had enough money to buy tires in 2010, forcing him to nurse the car to a poor finish on worn rubber.

Lepage and Bires showed up at Daytona in 2011, and within five laps, Kevin Lepage was limping toward the garage area in his #24 Ford Mustang. Bires was not too far behind. Lepage made a few more laps, but his debut was a bit concerning for a driver who had promised to race in 2011.

And like MSRP Motorsports, it wasn't just bad luck. After three races, Kevin Lepage had completed only 40 of 520 total laps. Kelly Bires had completed 29 laps...total. At Bristol, Kevin crashed in the third practice session Friday. Shortly afterwards, the #24 team withdrew their entry. Their backup car, after all, was the #25 car...the car that completed two laps on Saturday before parking the car due to "handling problems."

And so we have a rising-star team that has become something of a punch line this year. Ed Rensi has not been shy about the financial problems of the series; he said years before that he had lost sponsorship from McDonald's because they insisted on putting a Cup driver in their car. Yet how encouraging is it to a sponsor when a team cannot bother to attempt more than a few laps each week? The Rensi cars have some sponsorship - from a Web site that claims to leverage local sponsors for small teams - but the fenders of the Rensi cars have been sponsorless for the most part. And what sponsor would want to support a car that disappears ten laps into the race? Worse yet, by withdrawing from Bristol, Lepage eliminated his shot at a guaranteed start based on race attempts. If they were to secure a sponsor, it would be a long, hard road from here. Bires is no better off, a tough break for a driver who was pegged as a championship hopeful before the 2010 season. There is a Team Rensi Web site...but all it promises is that the team will be "racing" in 2011. Parking a car after a mile of driving is not racing.

I don't think there's any doubt that this business of racing is expensive. Junior Johnson once said that the best way to make a small fortune in auto racing was to start with a large one. In the last five or six years, we've seen the departure of such long-term, visible NASCAR sponsors as Kodak and General Motors, with others like Interstate Batteries, DuPont and Budweiser scaling back their programs. Even Jack Roush has had difficulty selling sponsorship programs; his Nationwide programs are largely sponsorless, and early in the 2010 season he was struggling to find backers for Matt Kenseth's season.

But this is about making mediocrity an art form. It's about finishing last with a purpose, being out there to collect a paycheck instead of trying to earn that paycheck. It's about qualifying for a race with no intent to race, while other teams with a desire to compete go home early. It's a shame, really.

As a parting note, the start-and-park battle got exciting in a neighboring garage stall Saturday as well. Before the season, Jennifer Jo Cobb had signed on with Second Chance Motorsports to run in the Nationwide Series, pooling Second Chance's small team with Jennifer's Truck Series pit crew and her marketability. Immediately before the race yesterday, Jennifer informed Rick Russell, team owner, that she refused to start the car, nor would her pit crew pit the car. When the press caught up with Jennifer, she explained that ten minutes before the race, she was told that she would be parking the car within a few laps, and if she did not, he would order NASCAR to black-flag the #79 Ford. Moreover, she would not be in the car at California. Jennifer insisted that she would not start-and-park her car to collect a paycheck, and quit minutes before the race. Rick Russell insisted that Jennifer and team knew of the start-and-park arrangement when they arrived at the track. He managed to put another driver in the car Saturday, too...who made four laps and returned the car safely to the garage area. Ultimately, it cost Jennifer Jo Cobb her ride. She claims another owner "has her back," and judging by a brief relationship with the Baker-Curb team last year, I could see her stepping into the #27 car. But the Baker-Curb team has been starting-and-parking since Daytona, where their car crashed out early on. Jennifer markets herself well and has her own apparel companies, but that might not be enough funding to get her back on the track for more than a few carefully-planned laps.

Maybe there is justice, though. Phil Parsons' #66 Toyota, the car he insisted would run full Cup races in 2011? They blew an engine early on at Bristol today and finished dead last.

And The Point Of All These Changes Is...

There are two weeks to go before Daytona. A responsible blogger would have been blogging on the daily announcements leading up to the 2011 season opener...well, daily. Unfortunately, blogging doesn't pay the bills, and so here I am, playing catchup.

And I would be remiss if I didn't first address probably the biggest announcement of the 2011 NASCAR seasons thus far: the new points system.

The story of the now-former NASCAR points system is often touted as legend: Bob Latford supposedly drew up the system on a napkin before the 1975 season, and it stuck. The winner of a race was awarded 175 points, with five fewer points going to each position until sixth place. Sixth through eleventh would be separated by four points each, with points decreasing by three for every position after eleventh. Unlike previous systems, which were relative to conditions such as race length and prize money earned, the new system was standardized for all races. It was intended to encourage teams to run for a championship, in an era when few teams had the luxury of funding to chase a title. Richard Petty won the 1975 championship, but independent drivers Dave Marcis and James Hylton finished second and third under the new system, on the strength of their consistency (only seven drivers ran all 30 races, and Marcis had one victory in 1975 to Petty's 13).

Not that Latford's system went unchallenged since the seventies. It was in the media-rich '90s and 2000s that it truly came under fire. When Matt Kenseth won only one race en route to his 2003 championship, while Ryan Newman won eight races and finished in sixth place overall, the outcry was that Newman's race victories should have carried more weight in the points than Kenseth's consistent season. With Kenseth's steady success blamed for lagging TV ratings and NEXTEL primed to be a new series sponsor in 2004, NASCAR chose to tweak the system. The result was the controversial "Chase for the Championship," a sort of playoff system where, after twenty-six races, the top ten drivers in the points would be locked in to compete amongst themselves for the series title, re-seeded according to their position in the points, and later based upon the number of wins they scored on the season.

The points system was never a totally intuitive points system. But at the same time, if you (as a fan) could grasp the workings of the points system, you were part of the "in" crowd. It was sort of like the track operator who explained that for years, they had never needed a scoreboard because "we knew Vermonters could count."

I suppose that's why I felt insulted when Brian France announced a new "easier to understand" points system for 2011. The new system awards 43 points for first place, with one fewer point for each lower position, and three bonus points to the race winner (plus a single bonus point for laps led and one more for the driver who leads the most laps). All drivers still receive points, so if you scale down the old system, the spread through the field is still about equal, with the exception of the top eleven (where the spread used to be a bit wider) and the race winner. So while I'd prefer no change to token change, it's not the system that I have a problem with.

It's that we, as fans, were told we needed something "easier to understand." So are NASCAR fans stupid? (My friends would argue this point, but mostly for my reaction.) What about simply widening the gap between first and second place, as was done a year or two ago? That way, a small points premium still exists for a top ten finish, with a higher weight for winning. That's the effective outcome here, anyway. Or give first, second and third places a higher points differential and keep the rest the same.

Instead, Brian France and NASCAR have handed fans the equivalent of the Easy Reader version of the same points system, simplified for fans' convenience. Never mind that only the savants in the fan base (who already would have no problems with the old system) and ESPN's statisticians (who have computers) are going to compute points standings on the fly. And never mind that they've altered the Chase recipe yet again, this time including the two drivers outside the top ten (but inside the top twenty) who have the most race wins.

The PR line is that this is another step toward solving sluggish TV ratings and race attendance. Incidentally, this is a problem NASCAR has faced since, oh, they started messing with the championship system wholesale in 2003. I would go out on a limb and even point to 2001. That was the year NASCAR transitioned from a primarily cable-TV schedule to broadcast-network fodder. Instead of no-nonsense broadcasts for race fans, we were treated to gimmicky broadcasts playing NASCAR up as some kind of spectacle. I've long felt that the pressure was on to shift NASCAR racing from an enthusiast's sport to a sport that could be followed by the most casual viewer, like football. And so we old-guard fans were treated to inane interviews and contrived catchphrases and broadcasts that assumed that everyone tuned into Fox was watching cars go around in a circle for the first time ever. NASCAR and their TV partners started chasing viewers, not fans. In the boardroom, viewers can be quantified. Fans are a little harder to pick out.

That's the best explanation I can come to as to why, since 2001, NASCAR racing has undergone so many tweaks and changes. "Aero-matched" race cars. A championship playoff system. Green-flag finishes. Caution flags for "debris on the track" that bunched up the field, but without any debris to show for it. A tweak to the playoff system. The "car of tomorrow" redesign (which I can't argue has produced a safer race car, but the original model lacked aesthetics that have been creeping back into the newest version). Another tweak to the playoff system. Late race-start times to benefit West-coast fans, then consistent start times to benefit all fans, and now late-season late-start times to conflict less with NFL football. Now, we get a new points system, and yet another tweak to the championship system.

All of the above have been introduced as solutions to sluggish ratings and attendance that started when NASCAR started tweaking the system in the first place.

NASCAR's biggest problem, at least as I've seen it, has been credibility. I'm not going to argue credibility this time, but I feel that in order to establish credibility, a sporting organization needs to be consistent, and this goes back to the method that determines a champion. Again, I'll draw the comparison to the National Football League. Over the last several years, much like NASCAR, the NFL has tweaked its rules to create a better game (as athletes improve) and to promote better safety for the players. Evolution is natural. But the method of determining the NFL Champion has not changed. When the New England Patriots missed the 2008 playoffs despite a strong season in a strong division, no one changed the rules. This year, in the wake of the Seattle Seahawks clinching their division with a losing record, there was talk of new rules as to how home-field advantage is determined, but no one talked of keeping such a team from the playoffs as long as they win their division.

Yet when a NASCAR driver wins a bunch of races but runs inconsistently the rest of the season, and misses the championship cutoff, suddenly the rules must be reconsidered. It reminds me of a few seasons back, when both Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. had weak seasons and were likely to miss the Chase for the Championship. The talk centered around how TV ratings might suffer if two of the most popular drivers missed the Chase. Two years later, not ten but twelve cars were now eligible for the Chase. And Earnhardt still missed it.

In the last ten years, there have been at least four different approaches to determining NASCAR's premier-series champion, including this year's changes. To me, it feels like there should be just one.

No matter how easy it is to understand.