NASCAR Owners Need To Tread Carefully Or They Could Lose Everything

NASCAR’s team owners have been an unhappy bunch for quite some time. Led by the 14 member Race Team Alliance (RTA), team owners have been demanding a larger share of the NASCAR pie than they’ve been getting. It’s not a new battle, last season representatives from the RTA held a non-publicized press event with select members of the media to air their grievances as NASCAR began negotiating their next TV deal.

Currently under the deal, tracks get 65% of the “TV money” with 25% going to the teams and 10% to NASCAR. Apparently, the teams want more.

During the meeting with the select media members last October the RTA representatives said the current economic model that forces them to rely mainly on sponsorship was one that was unsustainable and predicted a dark future for the sport if something wasn’t done about it.

Some of the owners said the future of the sport itself was in question. All this despite a banner 2022 season that saw an uptick in attendance and an influx of new sponsors to the sport, something that appears to be continuing into this season.

Wednesday the team owners fired another shot across NASCAR’s bow. According to published reports the team owners boycotted the sanctioning body’s quarterly meeting saying they believe NASCAR has not been negotiating in good faith.

NASCAR has gone on record saying they are willing to work with all the teams on financial security and emphasized that in a statement.

“NASCAR is committed to open and productive dialogue on a regular basis with all industry stakeholders,” NASCAR said in a statement printed by the Associated Press. “We remain committed to continuing discussions in the spirit of collaboration and with the shared goal of growing our sport for the benefit of all stakeholders.”

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Obviously, the team owners don’t feel the same way. The issue this time seems to center on Charters something adopted by the sport in 2016 for 36 cars as something close to a franchise model. The Charters guarantee a team’s car will make the field for a race, thus helping to increase the sponsorship appeal and allow the teams to charge more for sponsorship. The Charters have become a hot commodity with teams selling or leasing them to other teams for upwards of millions of dollars. According to NASCAR’s rules the Charters are renewable and can be revoked by NASCAR if the team doesn’t perform to a certain standard.

Teams want to make the Charters, which expire at the end of 2024, permanent. According to them however, NASCAR isn’t willing to even discuss that with them now, which lead to the Wednesday boycott.

So where might this all lead? One only needs look back to America’s largest open-wheel racing series to see what could transpire. In the mid-1990s open wheel racing, sanctioned at the time by the United States Automobile Club (USAC) was enjoying a popularity surge. That rise ended however when in 1996 Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George launched a competing series, the Indy Racing League.

There is of course a lot more that went on to get to the IRL and CART split, and a great deal went on in the ensuing 15 years until the IndyCar series emerged. In that span however, the popularity of the sport was never the same and any momentum it had was long gone.

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NASCAR is now growing once more in popularity, but so is IndyCar and even Formula 1. Neither of the open wheel series are enjoying the kind of status NASCAR enjoys, but that could all change in seemingly an instant.

The vast majority of tracks NASCAR race on are owned by NASCAR, or Speedway Motorsports. Should the RTA decide to split into its own series the biggest question is, where would they race.

The team owner’s actions Wednesday could be another case of using the media to leverage a better deal with NASCAR. After all, there was no talk Wednesday about the TV money and NASCAR is currently deep into hammering out its next TV deal. Instead, it was about the Charters. The team owners could be trying to get a better deal, or a quicker resolution to the Charter renewal, and that is certainly not a bad thing at all. One of the “demands” is to have NASCAR chairman Jim France and executive vice chair Lesa France Kennedy at the meetings according to the AP.

Should Wednesday’s actions, and those last year, be something more however, and should the RTA talk about trying to start their own series or breaking away from NASCAR, they need only ask Tony George how it worked out for hm, the Indy Racing League, and open-wheel racing in America.