A skirmish has broken out between the old-time stock-car fans who think NASCAR is headed to Boot Hill — or already has one foot in the grave — and the younger stock-car fans who think the grumblers are too pessimistic when everyone should be … gosh-darn positive!
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As with most debates, both sides have valid points, with the sweet spot somewhere in between. NASCAR has lost live attendance and television ratings at an accelerating rate over the last three years, but the sport is hardly dying. Not even close. Look at what just unfolded at Bristol.
The Bristol Herald-Courier included an important number in its report from Saturday night’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway that NASCAR used to include in its post-race statistics. The newspaper estimated that about 95,000 were at the race track for the big Cup race.
That sure is a lot of people — more than any NFL stadium seats. But Bristol has a capacity of about 162,000. That means there were 67,000 empty seats, give or take, for a short-track summertime tradition that had a long waiting list for tickets before the recession 10 years ago.
By all accounts, Kurt Busch won a tight, tough, exciting and entertaining race that started with no less than a 15-car pileup. Busch outlasted Kyle Larson to earn an automatic berth into the Cup playoffs. Larson will probably get in, too, and he did not seem too disappointed.
“I think just Bristol is an awesome place,” Larson said in his post-race news conference. “If we could race here every Saturday and Sunday, our grandstands would be packed; our TV ratings would be very high. Let’s build more Bristols.”
Larson is 26 years old, so you can forgive him for going a little overboard. But it was a good race under the lights at a famous track — just what NASCAR badly needs as it figures out how to prevent fans from leaving, let alone reclaiming lost fans or even luring new fans.
Actually, “more Bristols” would not be as good of an answer as maybe another rolling road course like Watkins Glen or dirt track like Eldora Speedway, but Larson had a good point: There were elements of the Bristol race — like great racing — that NASCAR should bottle. The racing is everything.
It should be noted that there was a good chance for rain Saturday, which forced NASCAR to move up the start of the race by an hour and which might have kept some fans from deciding at the last minute to buy a ticket. It did not rain, and all 500 laps were completed.
So to review: 95,000 is almost as many people as the 101,000 who watched the Daytona 500 in February, and 95,000 filled seats are way better than 67,000 empty seats. And the thing that counts the most — the product — received high reviews.
(The Herald-Courier’s crowd estimate, incidentally, came from its veteran racing reporter, Allen Gregory, after he consulted with other veteran racing reporters in the press box. Works for me.)
Then NASCAR’s other important metric, the television numbers, came in. These were not so good, but they carried a giant asterisk. The race drew a 1.4 rating on the NBC Sports Network, compared with a 2.3 rating in 2017, off a whopping 39%. That is terrible. But wait.
The 2017 race was broadcast on NBC, which has a much higher potential viewership than NBCSN on cable. The Aug. 5 race at Watkins Glen was on NBC this year. It drew a 2.3 rating and 3.67 viewers, compared with a 2.0 rating and 3.25 million viewers in 2017 on NBCSN, a 15% jump.
NBC is not comparing the 2018 Bristol numbers with the 2017 Bristol numbers. Instead, the network compared the Bristol number with the last Saturday night race it carried on NBCSN — a July 14 race at Kentucky Speedway — and the Bristol number was 3% better.
Plus, NBC says that each of the six Cup races it has carried this season has been the most-watched cable sporting events of that weekend. This would seem like a good thing, even though NASCAR was pushed to NBCSN by, yep, a rerun of America’s Got Talent on NBC. People don’t watch sports on TV, or much of anything on TV, as much as they used to.
Jim France — who became NASCAR’s interim CEO and chairman after his troubled nephew, Brian, was arrested on DUI charges —won’t give a state-of-NASCAR news conference until he gets a better sense of its issues. NASCAR won’t implode in the meantime.
But it is clear that at least some tinkering under the hood will be needed, if not a tune-up, or even an engine overhaul, to torture several auto analogies. But the parts are still there. It still comes down to the racing. If it is good, and it is affordable, people will keep coming back. That is what NASCAR needs to work on
Source: Story Dave Caldwell Forbes