Going, Going, Gone

I wonder if other fans ever find themselves longing for the days of the motor racing dictator. The first half of the current season has finally cast doom over this once respected livelihood, one whose demise began with the passing of Bill France Jr. in 2007.

Earlier this year, one of France Jr.’s counterparts and the last solo operator in American racing, Tony George, had his seat of power shaken. An internal family movement is afoot designed to separate George from running both the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy Racing League. Apparently, George’s hold on power is less than dictatorial.

 In Formula One, the apocolypse and threatened breakaway series of participating manufacturers has passed, because Max Mosley has agreed to step aside as commander in chief at the FIA. So we await a new leader chosen between the competing interests of the F1 teams and Bernie Ecclestone, the FIA’s business manager. The new man in charge will, by this definition, not have the same autocratic powers as the dictatorial Mosley.

France Jr., formerly the NASCAR chairman and one of the last of the dominant motor racing bosses, had this figured out years ago. Motor racing had become too big, too sprawling and too commercial for the old ways of doing things with one man in charge, he figured. Not only was new blood needed, but a spreading of the responsibility was required for making things work.

France Jr. established a five-person board of directors for NASCAR. It included a “president of the garage” (Mike Helton) and his daughter Lesa France Kennedy, fully empowered to run the speedway side of the family business. Then he handed son Brian the reins to NASCAR with the Chase for the Championship and the Car of Tomorrow already in place. Bill Jr.’s brother Jim France, meanwhile, helps keep the whole thing from getting out of kilter as the crucial vote on the NASCAR board.

The need for a different way of doing things at the top of motorsport was a message received by longtime impressario and former president of the Lowe’s Motor Speedway H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler not long ago. Last year, Wheeler and his boss, race track mogul Bruton Smith, went their separate ways after three decades together because the chairman of Speedway Motorsports wanted a new approach that spreads the power of decision-making.

Smith now has a deep line-up of relatively young promoters in place at his NASCAR venues to oversee the future of Speedway Motorsports, including his son and presumptive heir. In some ways, it’s a knock-off of the transition established by France Jr.

More rule by committee has arrived not necessarily due to a lack of respect by the elders who once ruled with iron hands. But because times have changed.

But I also wonder if the new methodology, under so many commercial demands, is able to keep up with a fast-moving sport dependent on close competition at high speeds. In F1, for instance, aging Ecclestone seems to have lost his midas touch dependent on compelling TV in the midst of manufacturers making themselves heard.

At NASCAR, there’s enough tinkering with race procedures that it’s difficult for a fan to keep up, assuming the TV ads don’t wipe out

most of the race to begin with. Over at the IRL, they’ve figured out how to prevent passing much like NASCAR and F1, the latter now home to runaway brides instead of races.

These days, major league motor races are Big Events. Occasionally a race breaks out. Perhaps it was ever thus and it’s only a matter of perception due to today’s crusty self-importance of the celebrity drivers and the major money always hanging in the balance. Somehow the races that turned out slightly mundane were more palatable back in the day. Racing was perceived as a bona fide effort to accomplish something extraordinary by just getting the dad-gummed car around the track without the driver breaking his neck.

The sport was always full of commercial hokum under any circumstances. The great Nuvolari wore an outrageous wardrobe in the pre-war Grand Prix days. Tim Flock and his spyder monkey Jocko Flocko sold more than a few tickets to NASCAR races in the 1950’s. (The monkey eventually got fired, said Flock, because “he couldn’t sign his autograph.”)

There remains the creeping uneasiness that the current world-wide problems are more a matter of commerce than perception. Juan Pablo Montoya, the $10 million a year man, personifies this unhappy circumstance. Once a stout charger and a major mixer in CART, F1 and to some extent NASCAR, Montoya now says he’s points racing even on the road courses so Chip Ganassi Racing can hit the, um, target. These days, telling your sponsor you made the Chase is more important than winning a race.

We can only hope for less points racing and more overtaking as a result of decisions by the current and future committees in charge. Presumably, they will have more than just a passing interest in sport as well as commerce.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jonathan@jingrambooks.com.

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 Filed under Uncategorized |