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.
Yet rather than put NASCAR in neutral, France chose to be an agent of change. His latest move: lifting NASCAR' s decades-old ban on hard-liquor ads, which could prove a lucrative source of revenue.
Piling up the points. Clearly, his boldest move so far has been to rejigger the sport's 30-year-old scoring system. Historically, drivers accumulated points toward the championship over the course of the season. But that often resulted in a single driver's nursing an insurmountable lead over the last few races--and some dull finishes. France's new "Chase for the Championship" reset the points with 10 races to go, giving the top 10 teams a healthy chance at the cup. The goal is to boost ratings and interest in October and November, when the onset of the NFL, the World Series, and college football normally relegates stock-car racing to a ratings also-ran.
Is it working? TV viewership in the last third of the season is up slightly, according to Nielsen Media Research. But any dramatic changes could take a few years to show up in ratings. And many NASCAR participants remain uncertain about the new system. "I'm still sort of out to school on it," says team owner and seven-time champion Richard Petty.
The alteration has definitely generated a buzz, though, say network and NASCAR executives, who point to better coverage of the Nextel Cup by the major media this season. It's a sore spot for France: "We are underserved relative to the size of our audience, so the most important thing is turning the corner with the general media," he says. France was previously headquartered in Los Angeles, where he administered broadcast rights and spearheaded media and entertainment deals for NASCAR. The big TV contract and an IMAX movie are two of the projects he led.
NASCAR' s realignment is probably the most fundamental change underway. It involves moving races from sleepy southern towns to big media markets where sponsors want them. In the past decade, races have been moved to Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Las Vegas. This year, Phoenix and Dallas were added to the schedule, and plans are being laid for tracks in the Seattle area and New York City--probably on Staten Island. Because the season can't be expanded any further, places like Darlington and Rockingham, N.C., must give up races. "It's very ticklish," says David Hill, chief executive of Fox Broadcasting and head of Fox Sports. "As NASCAR grows, it has to cut some umbilical ties with the area that gave the sport birth."
France treads delicately around the topic of race realignment, probably because some 40 percent of NASCAR' s fans are southerners. "We're always going to have an enormous presence in the Southeast," says France. "But we will take some events to other markets to have a better footprint."
The large southern base is about the only truth to the stereotype of NASCAR fans as beer-chugging bubbas. Though NASCAR' s origins are male and blue collar, its fans are now 42 percent female and closely resemble the rest of America in terms of income and education. They're also predominantly white, though earlier this year NASCAR persuaded basketball great Magic Johnson to lead an initiative to put more African-Americans in the stands and, eventually, into driver's seats.
NASCAR fans do differ from other fans in a critical way, however. "They definitely are more responsive to sponsorships," says Beatriz Perez, vice president of sports and entertainment marketing at Coca-Cola, which has sponsored a NASCAR cup race in Charlotte, N.C., every Memorial Day weekend for the past 21 years. To an uncanny degree, NASCAR fans make conscious decisions at the grocery store to support their sport and their favorite driver. "From a sociological point of view, it's quite interesting; from a marketing point of view, it's pure gold," says Andrew Grenville of Ipsos-Insight, a global survey firm that measures NASCAR fan brand loyalty.
That's exactly what lured Nextel to the sport. In 2003, the mobile-phone company signed its 10-year agreement with NASCAR, which replaced R. J. Reynolds's Winston brand with Nextel as the cup title sponsor. It's the biggest sports sponsorship deal in history, and it puts Nextel in good company: A third of the Fortune 100 companies sponsor NASCAR in one way or another, and France wants even more.
What do the fans love about NASCAR? The close competition, the side-by-side racing, and the passing. One of France's biggest efforts going forward will be to keep the races close--but also safe. The 2001 racing death of the most popular driver in a generation, "the Intimidator" Dale Earnhardt, dealt a serious blow to the sport, and France doesn't want to see it happen again. Nor do he and his staff want NASCAR to go the way of Formula One racing, which one driver, Michael Schumacher, has utterly dominated in recent years. Thus a new 9,500-rpm limit will be implemented for Nextel Cup cars next season. The goal is to cut the advantages of big-budget teams--because in racing money buys speed--and thus produce closer competitions.
Low whine. The rpm rule, handed down by NASCAR in August, was not well received by many of the teams. Yet prosperous times have kept complaints to a low murmur. "They call the shots, and you have to do what they say," says Bob Bahre, owner of New Hampshire International Speedway, "but they're fair, and everybody's benefited from it."
Surprisingly, there have been relatively few challenges to the France family's grip on stock-car racing since Big Bill France faced down a Richard Petty-led driver insurrection in 1969. The most recent came in the form of an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2002 by a shareholder of Speedway Motorsports Inc., a Concord, N.C., company that owns six tracks. The suit, which promised a battle royal between L.A. hotshot attorney Johnnie Cochran, representing SMI, and super lawyer David Boies for NASCAR, was settled in July when SMI was awarded another Nextel Cup race.
For now, the populace is peaceful. But other challenges loom for France, as NASCAR' s growth slows from spectacular to solid. Within NASCAR, most think he is up to the task. "When Bill Jr. took over from his dad, everybody thought it wouldn't work, that he didn't know what he was doing, but he proved them wrong," says Petty. "Brian will do the same."
2003 attendance at the Nextel Cup races 6.7 million
2003 broadcast TV viewership of an average race 9 million
2003 sales of merchandise licensed by NASCAR $2.1 billion
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.