Life in the fast lane
NASCAR CEO Brian France is revving up the stock-car racing money machine
Opened in 1950 as NASCAR's first superspeedway, Darlington Raceway is in rural South Carolina, 75 miles from the state capital of Columbia, with a soybean field and a fishing pond still within view. Beloved by the stock-car racing crowd the way Fenway Park is by baseball fans, the track hosted last weekend's Nextel Cup race.
This week, the 43 NASCAR teams chasing the cup pack their racecars, pit equipment, and spare parts into tractor-trailers and head to Florida for the 36th and final race of the year, the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Built in 1995 just 30 miles south of Miami, with art deco architecture, luxury skyboxes, and a computer-designed variable-banking track, Homestead-Miami represents the new face of NASCAR. The 75,000 fans expected to attend the race and the 9 million or so who will view it on NBC will not only watch the cars bang fenders and trade paint for 400 miles at an average speed of around 120 mph; they'll also witness a final race that will determine the champion. Thanks to a new scoring format that essentially creates a playoff over the final 10 races, a handful of drivers, including crowd favorites Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, remain within spitting distance of the championship.
Both the New South venue and the playoff system break from sacred NASCAR traditions. Yet the France family, ruler of NASCAR since the 1940s, has a rich history of doing just that, and scion Brian France is proving no exception.
Dynasty. After just a year in NASCAR's driver's seat, and amid plenty of early doubts about his ability to manage the sport, France's boldness and vision are already drawing favorable comparisons with his father, Bill France--Bill Jr. to everyone who follows the sport--who led NASCAR from 1972 until last year, and his grandfather William H. G. France ("Big Bill" ), a giant of a man who carved NASCAR out of the hard sands of Daytona Beach and ruled it with an iron fist for three decades.
The France family owns 100 percent of the NASCAR sanctioning body and controls publicly traded International Speedway Corp., the largest racetrack owner in the United States. ISC's market value is $1.4 billion; the France family has about 35 percent. NASCAR is a private company. The sport has made billionaires out of France's father and an uncle, Jim France.
The hope among the NASCAR community is that France, 42, has inherited some of his forefathers' wisdom in addition to their audacity. As NASCAR matures as a business and blossoms into a national sport competing head to head with the NFL for ad revenue and TV viewership, he'll need it in abundance.
NASCAR, far and away the nation's most popular motor sport, was on a tear before Bill Jr. passed the titles of chairman and chief executive to his son in October 2003. Its television audience grew from 6 million a race in 1991 to over 9 million last year, while attendance at cup races doubled to 6.7 million (the average price for a ticket at many races approaches $100). The sport is also enjoying the fourth year of a six-year, $2.4 billion TV deal with Fox, NBC, and Turner Broadcasting and the first year of a $750 million sponsorship deal with Nextel Communications, both of which are spreading wealth to the France family, track owners, and race teams alike. That record of success left the new boss wiggle room his first year. "Brian could have just slipped into the job; nobody was demanding he do anything," says Ken Schanzer, president of NBC Sports.
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