NASCAR turns up the volume – ESPN
When I was a kid, I talked a lot. Like, a lot. During the summers I would spend a good bit of time at my grandparents’ house, and looking back, I drove them crazy with all my yammering and the racket coming from video games and other noisy toys. Sometimes I’d be going on and on and then I’d ask a question and get no answer, only to look over to see that my grandfather had been asleep in his chair for the last half-hour.
How was he snoozing with me yapping and the Millennium Falcon zapping? He’d turned his hearing aids down. At least until grandma would come in, slap him on the leg, and tell him to crank them back up and stop ignoring me.
So why in the world would I be telling you this story on the ESPN.com NASCAR page? Because grandma has slapped NASCAR on the leg. There’s a movement afoot in the motorsports world, an alteration of action that is too important for us to ignore.
NASCAR is turning up its hearing aids. And that’s no small thing.
NASCAR officials aren’t just listening. They are listening. As in taking meetings, writing stuff down, and leaving those discussions with the pads of paper still under their arms and not immediately thrown into the recycling bin as soon as their guests have left the room.
With all due respect to the men who founded NASCAR and the men who went on to manage it in those founders’ wakes, such endings to such meetings was pretty much their modus operandi. It worked great for a really long time.
But these are not those times. They are, in fact, hard times. And the road map back to prosperity needs to be drawn up not by the autocrat himself, but with the input of the people.
That’s exactly what’s happening. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the people who make their living in the garage.
On Wednesday, I chatted with a couple of race car drivers about it all. One said, “You kind of got used to talking to the tops of people’s heads, like you know they aren’t really paying attention. But now there’s eye contact and nodding and all of that.”
On Thursday, I chatted with three NASCAR team executives. One used the phrase “sea change.”
Yeah, that’s right. This is so big that a race car suit is quoting Shakespeare.
The highest-profile proof of this new age of attentiveness came earlier this week, when it was announced that the Sprint Cup Series will run a new pack of tech specs to be tried out real-time at the Kentucky Speedway on July 11, reducing downforce in the hopes of bringing back more passing. If it goes well, it could be implemented at the other 1.5-mile ovals for the remainder of the season. That’s a dramatic about-face; a step toward returning to something closer to the 2014 car, whose handling produced more competitive racing up front over the closing laps than what we’ve seen so far with the altered 2015 package.
The Kentucky experiment was spurred by a two-hour discussion that NASCAR officials held with a handful of drivers at Dover just three weekends ago. NASCAR itself tried to downplay the significance of that meeting, but such temperance was countered by the downright giddiness of the racers themselves, excited over the first real semblance of a drivers’ council in recent memory.
“We’ve been trying to get all of our drivers together for about a year now, trying to get all of our ideas in one room together,” explained Denny Hamlin, a member of the council. “The drivers, we always talk amongst ourselves anyway, but having that line of communication to NASCAR has never been this open before. … You look around the room and you’re like, wow, this is a monumental time … where you’ve got the powers that be and some of the greatest drivers talking about how we can make this sport better.”
The drivers may have wrestled with getting everyone together, but their bosses have not. Almost exactly one year ago team owners announced the formation of the Race Team Alliance, seeking to create a more unified voice among NASCAR team owners. The RTA, which started with nine teams but has since expanded to 18, was initially met with the expectation (and some fear) of creating conflict. Those concerns weren’t exactly soothed by NASCAR’s initial reaction.
“You look around the room and you’re like, wow, this is a monumental time … where you’ve got the powers that be and some of the greatest drivers talking about how we can make this sport better.”
Denny Hamlin
But instead, according to each of the team executives I talked to on Thursday, it has enhanced communication with the sanctioning body. It’s not another giant town hall meeting that can turn into so much white noise or a conga line of individual voices marching through the NASCAR office truck over race weekends. Those outlets have and will always exist, as they should. But this new movement provides the opportunity to make bigger moves faster. “It’s streamlined the discussions and created joint points of concerns that need to be addressed,” one team president explained. “Instead of sorting through a list of what everyone said at a bunch of different informal one-on-one meetings, there are more people at the table for fewer meetings, and we all leave those meetings with a genuine plan of attack.”
Another executive added: “We all have certain angles we’re going to take based on what’s best for our team. Because of that we’re certainly not always going to agree with whatever NASCAR decides to do all the time. But the dialogue is more open than it’s ever been. And that’s a great thing.”
Any news concerning drivers and owners will always receive the biggest spotlight, but the reality is that their meetings are only the latest in NASCAR’s new approach. It dates back nearly four years, to the conferences that led to the current Generation 6 race car. That’s when the sanctioning body formed a manufacturer’s council that not only got bitter global corporate rivals Ford, Toyota and General Motors to sit at the same table, but also saw them work together to design a race car that both returned long-absent brand identity and created better racing.
“There was a flexibility across that table that we’d never seen before,” explained Jamie Allison, then director of Ford Racing. “The meeting started with, ‘OK, we’re open to any and all ideas’ instead of ‘OK, this is what we are going to do and you need to figure out how to deal with that.’ And as a result, I think we came out of that process with something special.”
Now the goal is to recreate that magic across the board via more time in the board room. The names of the two point men of this new NASCAR approach are brought up repeatedly by those with whom they’ve met, whether it be car makers and track owners or drivers and owners.
“Steve and Brent” are Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR VP and chief racing development officer, and Brent Dewar, NASCAR COO. Those are the two men taking the meetings, taking the phone calls and, most importantly, taking the notes that aren’t being tossed into File No. 13. They even take fan questions via Twitter.
I’m pretty sure Bill France Jr. wouldn’t have been a big tweeter.
Does this new approach mean that NASCAR will get every decision right? No, they won’t. Does this new approach mean that NASCAR will automatically do everything that its drivers and owners ask for? No, and they shouldn’t. Does this new approach mean that NASCAR races will suddenly become three-wide finishes every weekend from now until forever? Of course not.
But no matter how much some might try to soft-sell it all, this is a new approach to motorsports management. It’s a “hearing aids turned up” approach.
There is water flowing from the rock. And it’s refreshing. I say we drink it up and see what happens.
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