Upcoming season
A season of forgettable racing is in the books as NASCAR gears up for launch of 2013 cars.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — The season hadn’t even ended before NASCAR’s top executives were previewing 2013, the new “Gen 6” cars and elements of a five-year industry “action plan” designed to engage and excite fans.
The season ended with a celebratory final image of fresh-faced champion Brad Keselowski, drunk on the combination of his sponsor’s beer and the joy of giving team owner Roger Penske his first championship. And the days since Sunday’s finale have been a coming out party for the 28year-old from suburban Detroit, who is all over the television dial smoothly shilling for NASCAR.
It’s a reprieve from the bad news: ESPN’s ratings from the race at Homestead-Miami Speedway were down 25 per cent from last year’s race, the most-viewed in network history. Ratings were down or flat for all 10 Chase for the Sprint Cup championship races this season.
Why? Because the racing in 2012 was mostly forgettable, something chairman Brian France has tasked his entire competition department with fixing.
“The missing and final piece, which we’re working on now, is to improve on the quality of racing,” France said before Sunday’s finale. “Everyone knows a stated goal of ours is to have the closest, most competitive, tightest racing that we can. And that’s what we’re testing now.”
So in one sense, NASCAR couldn’t wait to get out of Homestead and officially close a 2012 season that opened with perhaps the most bizarre Daytona 500 in history.
Heavy rains washed out NASCAR’s marquee event for the first time in 54 runnings, pushing the race into a prime-time Monday night slot. Then, a freak crash between Juan Pablo Montoya and a truck loaded with jet fuel ignited a fuel fire and a nearly two-hour delay.
While track workers tried to clean the mess with Tide laundry detergent, Keselowski grabbed worldwide attention with both thumbs by tweeting updates from his car.
The TV ratings were good, the buzz surrounding NASCAR was better but it wasn’t sustainable as the Sprint Cup Series quickly fell into a stretch of nearly unwatchable racing. California ran caution-free until rain brought out the yellow that eventually stopped the race. Texas had two debris cautions until the race went green 234 laps to the finish.
Bristol had just one multi-car crash and featured a 219-lap green-flag run. Kansas in the spring had three cautions, two for debris and one for a single-car spin and the race ended with a 75-lap green-flag run.
With Richmond and Talladega looming, fans believed action-packed racing was ahead. Instead, Richmond was a bland affair until Carl Edwards was accused of jumping a late restart and Talladega exposed the disconnect between drivers and fans. Sure, there was the usual laterace multi-car accident, and Tony Stewart’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of the racing proved there’s no middle ground in racin’ vs. wreckin’.
“It’s not fair to these fans for them to not see more wrecks than that and more tornup cars,” he sarcastically said after the May race. “We still had over half the cars running at the end, and it shouldn’t be that way.”
When NASCAR returned to Daytona in July, promoter Bruton Smith was calling for mandatory cautions to spice up the racing and France was adamantly opposed to the need for gimmicks. But, France revealed that he’d dispatched senior vice-president of racing operations Steve O’Donnell to North Carolina to repurpose NASCAR’s research and development centre and zero in on the correct rules package for the debut of the new car next year.
Hours before the race, AJ Allmendinger was suspended for failing a random drug test. Nothing diverts attention like a scandal, and Allmendinger’s woes and his job with straight-laced Penske Racing dominated the news for the next month.
When Penske finally cut him loose, the free agency watch began. Matt Kenseth had announced in June he was leaving Roush Fenway Racing, and although it was a poorly kept secret he was taking Joey Logano’s ride at Joe Gibbs Racing, it wasn’t officially confirmed until the end of the summer.
So the industry watched and waited to see if Logano would get Allmendinger’s seat over Sam Hornish Jr., a Penske loyalist who has done anything at The Captain’s beck and call. When Logano did get the job, and it was revealed the hiring was at Keselowski’s urging, it should have been a clear sign that something special had developed between team owner and driver.