NASCAR chairman Brian France heads into the next decade of racing with several challenges.
In the first of a two-part series, France talked about the economic threats to the sport, as well as drug testing. Here are excerpts of that interview:
Q: Are there economic opportunities out there your sport hasn't explored?
A: Well, you know, to me it's about making sure that race teams, starting with the teams, that they have their new business model figured out because it's changed drastically. Same with our tracks. So I would say that's still the priority.
Obviously, you know, we're on our way to doing some things that are going to be more appealing to what we see as an emerging green economy, where new companies, new technologies are coming out. They're going to need to build their brands, build their companies' awareness, their technologies. We're going to be a very, very important place for those companies to invest in in the future. We're doing a lot of things in that area that will give us a chance to convince them to join into this sport.
Q: How can you get things turned around, financially, in 2010?
A: We've worked carefully with all of those companies to make sure that they stay in NASCAR. They're a good value; we're a big part of what they do in the future. On balance, that was all achieved.
No small thing on everyone's part.
When you look at all the things, when I talked to you in February, we're going to have full-fields in all national divisions, there were a lot of question marks there, this was going to happen, that was going to happen. On balance, we got through things fairly well, not easily. But we're poised to get onto the off-season, give everybody a much-needed break.
Q: Are you concerned that several teams still are looking for sponsors?
A: The cost structure is a function of the free market and what is available at the time in terms of sponsorship, in terms of other related revenues that the teams can obtain. There are always teams at this time of year that are under-funded, that are looking for sponsors. That's not anything new. I think clearly the sponsorship market is tougher than it's ever been in my memory. I don't anticipate that getting remarkably better. My sense is it will be difficult, but it's going to be fine. It will get better because we still have the best value proposition in sports. Despite any of the other dynamics going in or around us, it's still the only place you can brand on the playing field in the manner that we do. We're very proud of that, and we've always built around that, and we will continue to.
Q: Looking back, what are your feelings on the drug testing policy and the suspension of Jeremy Mayfield?
A: We believe that we made the right decisions to make an already tough policy even more tough. We think we have to do that with the circumstances that go on in the country today and in sports in general, and the fact that we have a 200-mile-an-hour race car, we think it was very imperative that we improve our follow, which we did. We will stand behind that, very clearly.
Q: Are there any more ways you can cut costs in the sport?
A: Well, there's no low-hanging fruit, but it's a core competence of ours historically to be able to take costs out of the system. It's fundamental to us. We've been talking about it for 60 years. There are a lot of motorsports divisions that sometimes it's important and sometimes it's not, depending on who you are. The reality is there are some things left. I talked about accelerating policy that obtains that. You'll be hearing about the scoring, electronic scoring, that we use, and we have used, and can we go fully electronic. If we did that, what would it save the teams who have to provide scores, other related things. It's in the millions of dollars. We'll be looking at that obviously very carefully. We'll be looking at anything we can on the tracks' behalf, on the team owners' behalf to do things that don't affect the quality of racing, per se. I understand that's sometimes a subjective proposition, but what are the things we can do to take their cost model down. We'll be working very hard on those over the off-season.
Q: Will the restrictions on testing be a year-by-year thing? Will there be more testing once the economy gets better?
A: There's some balance between no testing at all, which is the best savings equation for the teams, for sure, and having testing the way it was done in the past, which was a lot of testing. There's more publicity for the markets when teams are testing, getting the events revved up in advance. Rookies, teams that are behind from a competition standpoint, can make up some ground in the testing deal if it's available to them. So there's some perfect balance. We obviously have chosen to go the route of the cost savings, knowing that that has some consequences that are not perfect for all the things I just described. As we can dial it back, as the economy gets better, we will. I don't think we'll dial it back to the level we were two or three years ago where there was an enormous cost, some benefit, but too much cost. So we'll be dialing it as we go, as we watch the economy.
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