NASCAR trying to keep pace in ride-sharing world
With fewer Americans owning licenses, sport adapting
SOUTH BOSTON, Va. — There’s not a bad seat at South Boston Speedway, a fourtenths-mile oval in southwest Virginia, where a $10 ticket guarantees a view so close, whether from the front-stretch grandstands or lawn chair brought from home, that it’s like watching a stock-car race in the front yard.
Built on a country fairground in 1957, “American Hometown Track,” as its slogan proclaims, has a carnival feel, with a playground, T-shirt giveaways and pre-race autograph session with drivers. As day turned to dusk on a recent Saturday, the smell of funnel cakes, french fries and baloney burgers filled the air, followed by the deep-throated roar of engines.
“Here we go, folks! Nine laps to the finish!” the track announcer declared as the first of two 100-lap NASCAR K&N Pro Series races wound down. And Lynn and Mike Presby shot to their feet, counting down final laps - three, two, one - on fingers of their outstretched hands.
Everything the Presbys love about stockcar racing is here - furious passes for the lead and friendly fans. “The racing is so much more exciting,” said Mike Presby, 49, of St. Cloud, Florida, who favors NASCAR’s “minor league” to its elite division. “Way more exciting and more competitive!”
The problem for auto racing is that Presbys are in their late 40s - and that made them among the younger fans in a crowd of roughly 5,000, even though children under 12 were admitted free.
As the U.S. motor sports industry heads into its biggest weekend - highlighted by the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on Sunday - it is confronting a generational dilemma: Can it continue to prosper in a world in which fewer young Americans drive cars, let alone show an inclination to watch them race?
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The percentage of American 16-year-olds with a driver’s license was just 24.5 percent in 2014 - down from 46.2 percent in 1983, according to a study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The decline was notable though less stark among 20- to 24-year-olds over the same span, dropping from 91.8 percent to 76.7 percent.
Though the study didn’t analyze the cause, the trend suggests that millennials and the coming Generation Z, don’t share the traditional American love affair with cars. Moreover, in a 2017 article in Automotive News, former General Motors vice president Bob Lutz predicted that self-driving, autonomous cars would supplant traditional vehicles within 20 years.
What does this mean for the future of auto racing? Who’ll attend its high-octane Memorial Day weekend party if the next generation, reared in a ride-sharing world, views cars as a burden rather than a symbol of freedom and independence? And in a driverless world, will any pay to watch?
The questions aren’t so far flung that NASCAR, the country’s most popular form of racing, hasn’t thought about them. And its solution for capturing younger audiences is as far from the old-school grit of South Boston Speedway as could be imagined: Simulated, computer-based racing (“sim-racing,” to devotees), which doesn’t wreck a single car or emit one particle of exhaust.
“It’s a huge opportunity for us,” said Jill Gregory, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “One of the challenges we’ve always had is that you can’t go play NASCAR in your backyard; you can shoot a basket and do other things. But through esports and iRacing, that brings NASCAR into the homes of these young people.”
The hope is twofold: One, that sim-racing proves a pipeline for the sport’s next generation of racers. There’s evidence of that now, with 20-year-old William Byron, who’s atop the rookie-of-the-year standings in NASCAR’s elite Monster Energy Cup ranks, crediting iRacing with honing his on-track skill. Wisconsin’s Ty Majeski, 23, landed a job as a developmental driver for Roush Fenway Racing in 2017 largely because he was iRacing’s highest rated competitor.
Just as fervently, NASCAR hopes that online racing proves a pipeline for its next generation of fans.
Mark Coughlin, a former motor sports marketing executive who is now head of marketing and revenue at the esports holding company Envy Gaming, Inc., is skeptical.
“Every sport out there is trying to check the box of, ‘Are we doing esports?’ - the NFL with Madden, FIFA, NBA 2K,” Coughlin said. “They see all the data that point to a generation of folks that have grown up with controller or phone in their hand, and assume that what they play as a kid they’ll watch as an adult.”
But the most popular esports, Coughlin noted, are those with a fantastic, comic-book feel, in which gamers assume personae and special powers, build alliances and fight enemies in mythic worlds. Online versions of traditional games, whether basketball or racing, feel two-dimensional, by contrast, and don’t inspire the same fanaticism.
“It won’t have that crossover appeal,” Coughlin said, asked about the chance of online racers morphing into real-life ticket-buyers, “but it might bring a small trickle of fans.”
A trickle would help. NASCAR’s TV ratings for its elite Cup series are on a decade-long slide. And race-day attendance has declined so markedly that track-owners have razed grandstands to slash seating capacity by 20, 30 and even 50 percent.
Particularly troubling is that NASCAR’s fan base is aging rapidly - more rapidly than any other major sport. According to a Sports Business Journal analysis of TV audiences, the average age of NASCAR viewers jumped from 49 to 58 between 2006 and 2016. The only sports with older audiences in 2016 were golf - the PGA, with an average fan age of 64, and LPGA (63) - followed by horse racing (63) and men’s tennis (61).
The average age an esports enthusiast, Coughlin noted, is 23.5. That’s why the race is on to capture their attention.
NASCAR’s strategy for attracting younger fans is multipronged, according to Gregory, and includes shifting content to digital platforms, heavily promoting its 20-something drivers and jazzing up the race-day experience with concerts and communal, bar-style seating options. Increasing its foothold in esports, chiefly via iRacing is another tactic.
Just this month, NASCAR announced a 12-week, youth e-racing series aimed at attracting and developing talent among teens aged 13 to 16. They’ll compete in iRacing on virtually-rendered iconic short tracks, with the top 50 in the points standings after eight weeks advancing to a four-week playoff.
Track owners are courting gamers, too. In March, Las Vegas Motor Speedway provided an esport lounge outfitted with racing simulators in its “Neon Garage” for its race weekend. Fans could spend race-day watching the Monster Energy Cup stars battle on the 1.5mile oval or strap in a simulator themselves to play the NASCAR Heat 2 video game.
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No form of motor sports depends as much on the connection to everyday passenger cars as NASCAR. The sport, by design, is anti-exotic. That’s what they’re called “stock” cars. Their essential appeal is their perceived ordinariness, which is what enables fans to believe, on some level, that Jimmie Johnson’s Chevy Camaro isn’t much different than the Camaro in their driveway.
Time and technology, however, have strained the myth of ordinariness. The death of carburetors made the shade-tree mechanic obsolete; the fuel-injections systems of today’s passenger cars demand computerized service from the dealership. That, in turn, eroded the do-it-yourself car culture of many old-line NASCAR fans. Still, NASCAR trades on the fantasy that any fan - young or old, male or female - could win the Daytona 500 in its cars.
Today, nothing fulfills that fantasy better than iRacing, the online racing series that, for a $99 annual fee, can turn a home computer into a race car.
For aspiring NASCAR racers, this is a godsend - a chance to practice on tracks they might race one day, whether the Watkins Glen road course in New York, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or even Le Mans in France, without the travel expense, much less the expense of tearing up a car if they wreck.
“If you hit a wall, you just hit a button, and you get you a new car,” explained racer Josh Berry, 27, who drives the No. 88 late-model car owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Berry, who has won the 2017 late-model championship on the CARS Tour, earned his ride at JR Motorsports after competing online against Earnhardt, who admired how he handled his simulated car.
The job offer came at an opportune time. Reared in Hendersonville, Tennessee, Berry started racing go-karts at 8 and had some success, so his father, who owned a restaurant, bankrolled his early progression. Even in the developmental ranks, racing is an expensive sport. Without a corporate sponsor, there’s virtually no chance of getting in equipment capable of impressing a potential big-time backer. So Berry started racing online, first on the NASCAR 2003 game and later, on the more professional iRacing, in which competitors earn points-rankings and grades based on their ability.
“It was a way to compete without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Berry said in a recent interview at JR Motorsports’ Mooresville, North Carolina, shop. “I think there’s a lot of people who race on there with aspirations to race in real life but can’t af- ford it. For a couple thousand dollars, you can get anything you’d need - a computer that can properly run it, a steering wheel and pedals. What it costs is a fraction of what it would take to race a late model.”
Berry was about to give up his dream of a racing career, his family having invested all it could, when Earnhardt asked if he’d test one of his late-model cars (an “audition” of sorts). Berry was fast, so he was given the chance to race it for real. He did well in the race, and it soon led to a job with JR Motorsports.
As Berry explains it, there are limits to what a driver can learn on a simulator.