Jacques Villeneuve was in Toronto this week to help dedicate the Fifty Years of Grand Prix Racing in Canada display at the Canadian International AutoShow (which runs at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre through next weekend) and one of the many things he said about racing is that the best thing you can do with it is to leave it alone.
He was talking in the context of Formula One, but he could have easily been talking about NASCAR or IndyCar.
For instance, CART (the forerunner of Champ Car, which morphed into IndyCar) was once at the top of the heap in North America. It eventually disintegrated (most people blame Tony George, but that’s a bad rap in my eyes) and one of the reasons it’s still alive is because the people behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway kept it going in order to protect their marquee race, the Indianapolis 500.
But the unravelling – I think – really started when the owners got greedy. The guy who ran the series at the time, Andrew Craig, came up with the idea of taking the corporation public. Shares were issued to the existing entrants, the theory being that their worth would increase as trading progressed and, at some point in the future, when an owner decided to sell his or her team, they would benefit substantially.
Instead, most (if not all) of those owners unloaded their shares just about as quickly as they received them and when the series went belly up, the only people who really suffered were a bunch of outside investors who were left with a lot of worthless paper.
Fans aren’t stupid. They saw what was happening and their loyalty to Indy car racing declined as quickly as the owners got rid of their stock. If the owners didn’t care about the series, why should they?
Which brings us to NASCAR, the franchise system and the Daytona 500.
Right or wrong, the beauty of the Daytona 500 (and it used to be this way at Indy, too), was that anybody could show up and try to qualify so long as their car passed tech, was determined to be safe and the driver was sufficiently experienced. The front row would be locked in (the pole and outside pole) and then everybody left would be sent out to fill the field through two qualifying races on the Thursday between Pole Day and Race Day. Finishing positions in those two races would determine starting spots three through 30 and then qualifying speeds would fill out the 43-car field.
Which means that if a non-regular finished in the top 14 of one of those qualifying races, he or she would get to start the Daytona 500.
That has gone the way of the dodo. If a car owner now doesn’t own a franchise, it is next to impossible to make it into the race. There are 40 starting spots in next Sunday’s 500 and 36 of them are guaranteed. Where once there would have been 50 cars or more trying to start Daytona, there are now 42. Canadian DJ Kennington of St. Thomas, Ont., is one of the four drivers getting ready to fight it out for the last two spots.
It’s this sort of thing that Jacques Villeneuve was talking about. Once you start mucking around with success, you stand a good chance of screwing it up. IndyCar is still fighting to regain what it once had. NASCAR’s franchise model might also prove to be its undoing.
Meanwhile, Dale Earnhardt Jr. sure doesn’t look like he’s lost his touch or his ability to drive a racing car really fast. Earnhardt, who sat out most of the last half of the 2016 Sprint Cup season because of a severe concussion, was on the pole for the 500 in Sunday time trials until the last second when his teammate, Chase Elliott, just edged him out.
Elliott won the pole for the second year, turning a lap at 192.872 miles an hour; Earnhardt’s speed was 192:864 mph.
As per the rules noted above, those two are locked into the two front-row spots. The rest will race Thursday for their starting positions but they don’t mean much anymore as compared to the way it used to be.
For a full story on qualifying, please click here. For a full story on the Busch Clash, which was won by Joey Logano on Sunday after being rained out on Saturday night, please click here.
Speaking of Earnhardt, and concussions, NASCAR announced this week updates to its concussion protocol for competitors. In short, if a car goes into the wall, the driver will be tested for concussion and will require medical clearance before being allowed to compete again. No longer will drivers be able to “shake it off.”
Next Sunday, the Daytona 500 will go to the post at Daytona International Speedway at 2 p.m. It can be seen on TSN, which will announce this week that it once again will show all NASCAR Monster Energy Cup races as well as all NASCAR Xfinity Series races in 2017. As well as showing all the races on conventional television, a new multi-platform agreement between TSN and NASCAR features expanded digital rights, allowing TSN to deliver a wide range of NASCAR content to fans across the country.
Said Steve Herbst, NASCAR’s Senior Vice-President of broadcasting and production: “NASCAR’s collaboration with TSN has been paramount to the sport’s growth in the Canadian market, our largest outside the U.S. We look forward to growing the sport in the years to come.”
Pinty’s Foods of Burlington will continue as title sponsor of the NASCAR Canada stock car series for 2017, which will be telecast again by TSN. The season will start May 21 at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park with the annual Victoria Day Speedfest.
Hey, talking about Monster Energy (we weren’t, but . . .), their Supercross rider, Eli Tomac, won his third Monster Energy AMA Supercross victory of the season Saturday night in Minneapolis. Tomac and the rest of the Supercross riders will be at Rogers Centre in a few weeks.
Although it was not unexpected, it was still sad to hear that former Camp Car World Series owner Kevin Kalkhoven and his partner, the driver Jimmy Vasser, had shut down their IndyCar racing team. The pit and other equipment has been sold to Ricardo Juncos, who has been preparing for an IndyCar entry for several year by entering cars and drivers in lesser series. Although reports indicate that Juncos plans to run the whole season, it’s also been reported that he’ll be an Indy 500 team with another couple of races thrown in. We’ll see.
nmcdonald@thestar.ca
nmcdonald@thestar.ca
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