CHAMPION AGAIN WON’T BE SOUTHERNER
Titlist’s changing face reflects NASCAR’s broadening landscape
Denny Hamlin might have been the one. Or Dale Earnhardt Jr.
But as the unforgiving nature of NASCAR’s new Chase for the Sprint Cup format pushed both out of title contention at Talladega Superspeedway, it unwittingly pushed the sport further from its past and harder toward its future.
The champion at stock car racing ’s highest level could be the guy from Connecticut; or the one from Missouri; or Indiana by way of California; or Michigan, New Jersey or California, again; or maybe one of the two from Nevada.
In any case, the champion of this Southernborn, Southern-bred series will not be a Southerner, just like every year of this centu-
“It’s immaterial,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “From our standpoint, from my standpoint, from NASCAR’s standpoint, we’re more diversified like this. If everybody came from North Carolina that won, the guys in California wouldn’t want to be involved. The fans in California wouldn’t want to be involved. The basic deal is, it’s been good for the sport.”
But with the roster of Sprint Cup regulars from NASCAR’s ancestral wellspring of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia down to Earnhardt, Hamlin and Austin Dillon, Jarrett said, the trend likely will never be reversed. Such is a loss of cultural heritage the equivalent of barbecue or Southeastern Conference football, he conceded. But such is the timeline of sports that grow beyond the niche.
“It really is (a loss). But there’s two ways to look at it,” Jarrett told USA TODAY Sports. “Obviously, for the fans — and we still have a huge fan base from the South — it would be nice if they had someone in that way. And they still do, especially with Junior, but we’re not that many years away from him starting to talk about the retirement side of it or getting out from driving. So then, who is going to fill that? And will the Southern fan base stay with the sport because they are getting names that they don’t necessarily recognize?
“But from the other side of it, I think it certainly opens up a lot of doors from outside other places in the States that will help fill that void. It will be interesting to see if there’s one place in particular that more start coming from. And I think we’ve seen that more from a sprint car side than anything else in recent years.”
Twenty Southerners combined to win 44 championships from the series’ inception in 1949 to 2000. Eight currently in the top 40 in points are Southerners — Hamlin, Earnhardt, Aric Almirola, Dillon, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., David Ragan, Trevor Bayne and Jeb Burton — and just Hamlin and Earnhardt qualified for the 16-driver Chase this season.
“I’m like one or two of the last ones left,” Kannapolis, N.C., native Earnhardt chuckled.
But like most with a stake in NASCAR, he’s more pragmatic than nostalgic as the series, its broadcast partners and the sponsors that underwrite it all seek greater market proliferation.
Earnhardt called Xfinity Series driver Daniel Suarez, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, a key figure in expanding the sport’s profile, saying, “The more diverse we get as far as our personalities in the cars, the better.
“There’s been so much attention paid to our attendance over the last several years and our ratings,” Earnhardt told USA TODAY Sports. “For us to reach these goals or the ambitions that (NASCAR chairman) Brian France and NASCAR has, and NBC has in their deal, for them to reach these ambitious goals and lofty goals, I think it has to get bigger. We race in Canada; we go to Mexico; we’re racing in Europe. They have a NASCAR Euro series. If one of those guys comes over here and is successful, those are the things we need for this sport to get bigger than we are now.
“I don’t think we’ll reach our past peak unless we’re continuing to be in front of new audiences.”
24 REASONS
Like many this season, this is very much a Jeff Gordon story. Originally from Vallejo, Calif., he relocated with his family to Indiana to further his career racing in sprint cars. The four-time series champion set to retire from fulltime Cup racing after this season is credited with opening two channels to NASCAR from previously untapped sources.
His spectacular entry into NASCAR’s highest levels showed a generation of Midwestern sprint car drivers that theirs was a route to a professional stock car career as well as open-wheel racing. The likes of Tony Stewart, Ryan Newman and Kasey Kahne followed.
And, with Ron Hornaday Jr., Gordon helped tap the West Coast and particularly California as both a market and a source of driver talent.
“It just changed the culture for owners, that you don’t have to be born and raised in a stock car to get a shot,” said six-time series champion Jimmie Johnson, a native of El Cajon, Calif., who followed with several drivers, including defending titlist Kevin Harvick, from the Golden State.
“NASCAR was just not on anybody’s radar on the West Coast until Gordon came along,” added Johnson, Gordon’s teammate at Hendrick Motorsports. “I mean, you definitely had your circle track guys, so Hornaday is that. He was banging that drum and going to the East Coast and running all these touring events and showing that, hey, we can race out here. So I think Hornaday was probably priming the pump.
“And then Jeff, on the scale that came with his arrival, I think woke up the West Coast, like, hey, this is a very cool form of racing, we should pay attention to it. TV moving around like it did, I feel like the more polished persona was becoming more of a need because of the sponsorship dollars and revenue and the way the world is today. Gordon is really responsible.”
PAVING WAY
Former Xfinity and Camping World Truck series champion and Lewisville, N.C., native Dillon and his brother, Ty, were schooled in dirt Late Models because their family had the means and motivation to travel to the Midwest to compete. And because the best training ground was not on Southern pavement, Austin Dillon said.
“Most of my dirt racing came from the Midwest when I was growing up,” said Dillon, in his second Cup season with Richard Childress Racing. “I didn’t live there, but we traveled out that way. Our short track programs here just aren’t what they used to be. Denny Hamlin came from the South; he ran short tracks. You just don’t have what they were. When my dad (Mike Dillon) was racing, you had South Boston (in Virginia), Tri-County (in North Carolina), New River ( Valley in Virginia), and you had Elliott Sadler, Andy Houston, all these guys racing in that area. You’d have 25 to 30 Late Models a night. And you go to a short track on a Saturday now, and you see 11 Late Models, 12 Late Models. You don’t get those numbers you had when they were asphalt racing.
“That’s why we were able to take the dirt route and you go run a race out at Eldora (in Ohio) and you have 115 cars. You sit on the pole there, and people watch. You go to a West Coast deal and somebody goes to a race and it’s got 60 Midgets there, or Chili Bowl for instance, guys win those races and you see it. You win a race with 11 cars in it, and it’s kind of hard to justify those opportunities. That’s why I think the South is kind of behind right now as far as short track racing goes.”
The problem, Dillon said, is geographical, financial and, oddly, geological.
“Dirt racing is getting more popular here, but the dirt is not as good,” he said. “The soil is not as good. That’s a part of it, too. Having the right dirt to come race on, we would have dirt track racing on a Saturday night here 30 minutes from where I live and we’d choose to go six hours away because the dirt was better and you see better dirt racing.
“You just have to have the economy, right dirt and right tracks and right promoters to get the big races. And that’s when you’re going to see more Southern champions, when they get to NASCAR.”
Former Charlotte Motor Speedway president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler said the next Southern stalwart champion was perhaps “wreaking havoc on some short track in the Alabama pines or a wild track in the foothills of the Carolinas.”
“Problem is he probably doesn’t talk right, dress right or have the social skills that some sponsor wants,” Wheeler said. “Have I described a young Dale (Earnhardt) Sr.? Yep.
“Never in the history of NASCAR have we needed that Dale Earnhardt Sr., Junior Johnson superstar (more than right now). ... It is the sponsors that are making it difficult in this age of movie star drivers.” CLOSE CALLS Hamlin was nearly the one. So was Mark Martin, with two of his five career runner-up points finishes coming after 2000.
Hamlin, from Chesterfield, Va., entered the penultimate race of the 2010 season with a 33-point lead on second-place Johnson but was undone by a miscalculation by crew chief Mike Ford that forced him to cede the race lead for a late fuel stop. Johnson won his fifth consecutive title the next week, with Hamlin second. Hamlin, 34 and racing for the most successful team of 2015 in Joe Gibbs Racing, figures to have several years left in his prime.
Martin, from Batesville, Ark., won 40 races over 31 years before retiring after 2013. He was bested by Stewart in 2002 and Johnson in 2009. If there is consolation for the South, two of his runner-up finishes came to seven-time champion Earnhardt Sr. of Kannapolis. The other came to Gordon, who is going for his fifth crown Nov. 22 in the finale.
Earnhardt Jr., a two-time Xfinity Series champion, is NASCAR’s most popular driver. Junior Nation still yearns for a title, but Earnhardt’s best Cup finish so far is third, in 2003.
Maybe the Dillons will re-establish a Southern foothold. Austin Dillon doing so in a No. 3 Chevrolet made sacred by the late Earnhardt Sr. would have additional resonance.
And Chase Elliott has the opportunity to provide a perfect symmetry for those yearning for a Southern revival. The defending Xfinity Series champion and 19year-old son of 1988 Sprint Cup champion Bill Elliott, a native of Dawsonville, Ga., with the drawl for verification, Elliott will succeed Gordon next season at Hendrick Motorsports.
Granted, an Xfinity title has been no harbinger of Cup success, as Dillon and Stenhouse (of Olive Branch, Miss.) have not established themselves as weekly threats or Chase qualifiers.
But if Elliott can fulfill the weighty expectations and bear out his bloodlines, he could use the No. 24 Chevrolet to re-establish a link to NASCAR’s Southern roots after Gordon used it nearly a quarter century ago to spur an evolutionary leap.
And for some still with a taste for pre-boom NASCAR, that might be progress, too.