THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 22, 1996 TAG: 9606220378
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 205 lines
If you were NASCAR president Bill France Jr. and you had to pick a time when everything seemed just perfect in the frenetically growing world of stock-car racing, May 5 might have been that time.
It was three hours before the start of the Save Mart 300 at Sears Point International Raceway. The sun was blazing in a cloudless sky, the temperature was perfect, and another record crowd of more than 100,000 was inching through the gates.
This was in northern California, mind you - in the heart of wine country. Yet NASCAR was packing them in for a race where most spectators can't even see the entire track.
In the press center was an ESPN news release announcing a record television rating for the NASCAR race at Talladega.
On Wall Street, the prices for auto racing stocks were as strong as ever.
And France, the most powerful man in stock-car racing, was remembering how nice it was, that dinner the previous night in San Francisco.
``You talk about the growth of the sport, I'm glad you mentioned that,'' he said. ``Fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have had that over there.''
Wouldn't have had what?
``That damn good abalone I had over there yesterday,'' he said. ``Better than those old hot dogs we used to have.''
O. Bruton Smith, chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc. and perhaps the second most powerful man in stock-car racing, had his own food-related analogy to show how NASCAR is coming up in the business world.
``Oh, yeah,'' he quickly replied. ``I get invited to breakfast now. I mean, I'm talking about with the silver and everything.
``I'd been to Wall Street many times and I'd been invited by some major brokerage houses, but I'd never met the president of the New York Stock Exchange.
``And for him to have a special breakfast for me, it makes you feel like you're somebody. It seems like `country boy makes good.' ''
From hot dogs to abalone, all the way to breakfast invitations on Wall Street - this is how far NASCAR has come.
France is 63, Smith 69. Both have been in the sport all their lives, and now they are witnessing a stock-car racing explosion beyond anyone's wildest imagination.
``There's been a tremendous amount of change in the last 10 years, but look at the last two or three,'' says NASCAR spokesman Kevin Triplett. ``My job is only remotely similar to what it was 2 1/2 years ago. Now, when a driver does something on the racetrack, I don't get 20 letters, I get 40.
``We're already breaking TV ratings records again this year. But it's so much more. Now we're helping promote cafes and NASCAR Thunder stores and speed parks and NASCAR Online. We've started a whole new truck series. We've added the Brickyard (a race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway).
``And one thing begets the other. One Sports Illustrated cover leads to another. Simon & Schuster has got a guy on the circuit this year. Other books are appearing. And TV shows. The number of foreign correspondents on our regular mailing list has increased dramatically. Everybody you talk to seems to have something in the works or an iron in the fire.''
Certainly NASCAR has never been hotter.
``I mean, look,'' says car owner Michael Kranefuss. ``Dave Marcis with a computer company (Prodigy) on the side of his car? And the amount of people who come to the shops every day, never mind during the summer, when people come from Washington and Oregon and Idaho to spend a week touring NASCAR country.''
Some crew members recall the Sunday night drive back from Watkins Glen, N.Y., last year. Two or three hours south of the Glen, somewhere in Pennsylvania, the trucks began encountering spectators along the side of the road and on the overpasses, some in their lawn chairs, waving banners and cheering them through.
``They were just greeting a bunch of trucks and watching them well into the night,'' Kranefuss said.
But is NASCAR getting too hot too fast?
``I tell you, I don't envy France's position,'' says car owner Bill Davis. ``This is what you want, and it's where you want to be. You want to have the fastest-growing sport. But that brings on a lot of problems. There's a lot of things to worry about and work on.''
The future promises issues such as whether the teams should be franchised, and whether two major stock-car racing circuits should be created from the Winston Cup series. France is predictably noncommittal about both.
But NASCAR's pressing issue is the schedule for 1997 and beyond. How will NASCAR expand? Will NASCAR give the new Texas Motor Speedway a second race? What will happen to North Wilkesboro? Are other short tracks doomed? Will France break up the conglomeration of races in the Southeast?
France is pondering the schedule issue during an interview in a private mobile lounge in the Sears Point garage. The door opens and Dale Earnhardt marches in amid smells from the grill outside where gourmet chefs from San Francisco are catering a luncheon for Earnhardt and his team.
Earnhardt flops down on a couch asks the reporter interviewing France: ``What are you beatin' on him for?''
Only Earnhardt has the nerve to interrupt a private meeting involving Bill France. But Earnhardt knows how much France admires him, and he knows he can get away with it. He's NASCAR's biggest star.
``He's talking about the growth of the sport,'' France says.
Earnhardt jumps right in.
``I'll say this, we do need to go to those major cities and get out of some places where we're at,'' Earnhardt says. ``We don't need five racetracks within a two-hour drive. We need to take two of those out, at least, and go to California and Vegas and St. Louis and Texas or wherever, and go to the major markets. Because that's where our growth is going to be.''
France is asked if he agrees.
``Yeah, to a point,'' he says.
Earnhardt interrupts.
``(Dallas Cowboys running back) Emmitt Smith and I were on `Oprah' together. Now he knows about that racetrack down there. But he don't understand NASCAR. He knows about me, but he don't know about Ted Musgrave. But if he knows about that racetrack, and if we go to that racetrack in that major city, it's going to bring us more recognition. We need the bigger arenas.''
``And that's coming,'' says France. ``Things will probably work out that way evolution-wise, but we don't have any set number. And I don't think that the size of the track per se - the fact the Martinsville is a half-mile track and something else is a mile track or a 2-mile track - that in itself is not a dividing line about who's going to stay on the schedule and who's not going to stay on it.
``It's not the size of the facility. It depends on how tracks keep up with increased costs. It's going to cost more. But the marketplace is going to determine all of that in the end.''
France's statement seems to bode well for a track like Rockingham, which seems more dispensable in light of its proximity to Charlotte and Darlington, but less so given the almost frantic series of improvements made there in the past three years.
It bodes less well for a full-size, 2.5-mile track like Pocono, which has two races in the space of five weeks and has been slower with capital improvements.
But can a track survive with just one Winston Cup event?
``The big problem that everybody has is the capital costs required to keep the facilities growing,'' France says. ``You still have to pay for these facilities. You have to repave them from time to time and you have to make necessary improvements.
``This is one reason we're trying to get the Busch (Grand National) series going where it will be a better series as far as financially successful. And we're hoping the truck series will develop into something like that so that they can replace (a Winston Cup date) with something. You want it to be just as good as if you had two (Cup) races.''
Several tracks - including Watkins Glen, Phoenix, New Hampshire and Sears Point - seem to be doing fine with just one Winston Cup event. And as Don Hawk, Dale Earnhardt's business manager, points out: ``I think we're seeing lately how strong track owners are because track owners are the ones buying up all the tracks.''
O. Bruton Smith has generated so much money from his Speedway Motorsports stock offering that he may have to look outside the sport to find enough places to spend it.
``We do have lots of money now, so we're all set here to do whatever we want to do,'' he said.
Smith sees his move to take his Speedway Motorsports public on the New York Stock Exchange as a key factor in the current growth of the sport.
``I did not realize what an effect it would have on our sport by going to Wall Street,'' he said. ``Because no one had ever taken our sport to Wall Street.
``What that did, that awakened some media giants like Forbes and Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. We had six major stories in the Wall Street Journal. We awakened the financial world by doing this.''
As the owner of the tracks at Charlotte, Atlanta, Bristol and the one under construction near Fort Worth, and half-owner of North Wilkesboro, Smith is beholden to France, the president of NASCAR, for Winston Cup dates. But France, as the chairman of International Speedway Corp., is also a track owner - at Daytona, Talladega, Darlington and Watkins Glen.
It presents a potential conflict, but both men insist it isn't a problem.
``I think Bill is a fair man,'' Smith said. ``He's never shown me anything but that.''
Said France: ``We don't ask other tracks to do something that we don't have a problem doing ourselves.''
Still, there is a sense that the two men are still a bit wary of each other, even after decades of working together, and that whatever tension exists between them has been heightened by the current growth explosion.
For instance, when France was asked about what pitfalls lie in the road ahead, he said: ``We want to see more revenue come in, but it needs to come in, hopefully, at a level where the people who are receiving it are going to be smart enough to spend it properly.
``You read about the guy who drives a truck and hits the lottery. The question is, when he gets all that new-found money he never had before, will he be smart enough to spend it wisely?''
Now, who could France have been talking about?
For his part, Smith is not keen on France's decision to have a 1997 exhibition race in Japan.
``No sir,'' he said. ``It does expose our sport. . . . But will it do anything beyond that, I don't know. I don't see any Japanese companies out here, do you?
``I think it would have been great to expose our sport in Europe. These sponsors do well in Europe, where there aren't so many barriers like there are in Japan to all of our companies.''
A smaller-scale issue for NASCAR is the growing problem with accessibility to drivers. On Sundays before a race, you hardly see some of them. They're all holed up in the lounges of their transporters. And the bigger the star, the less the accessibility.
``We were talking yesterday about how we've got to try to keep these guys accessible to the fans and the public,'' France said. ``And still recognize that when they stick their head out of the back of the truck over there, they're descended on by the corporate guests that are in here.
``But you can't get rid of the corporate guests. That goes along with the total marketing program of the companies that sponsor the cars.''
But all in all, doesn't the stupendous growth make a businessman feel good?
``That part is nice,'' France said. ``But when you're working in it every day, it hasn't made life any easier. It ain't as much fun as it used to be.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
NASCAR president Bill France Jr. is the most powerful man in what is
hailed as America's fastest-growing sport.
Graphic
JOHN CORBITT/The Virginian-Pilot
WINSTON CUP BRANCHES OUT
SOURCES: NASCAR/Goodyear
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB