I’m speaking about NASCAR’s struggle to improve its television ratings and overall event attendance. In case you haven’t noticed, both of these numbers have dropped dramatically since Dale Earnhardt’s fatal accident at Daytona back in 2001. No amount of design changes, competition adjustments, nor championship formats have been able to fully upright the USS Brian France.
Not that NASCAR, as an organization, hasn’t been trying to grow the sport. As you might guess, I’ll be talking about such positives as this season’s low-downforce rules package and new Goodyear tires that fade from grip to glass in only a handful of laps. I’ll also mention the sanctioning body’s ongoing embrace of emerging social media platforms and the youthful (new?) audience such mediums tend to attract. Tweeting with Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Snapchatting with Landon Cassill is a novel way for fans to stay connected with NASCAR.
But it still isn’t enough.
Maybe the problem stems from the notion that just when things in-and-around NASCAR Nation seem to be settling into a growth phase, the sanctioning body (or Brian France) go ahead and introduce some kind of change.
The recently-leaked Sprint Cup rules package for 2017 serves as a prime example, along the forthcoming possibility that Cup drivers will be deemed ineligible to compete in XFINITY or Camping World Truck series events. There's even tire restrictions for next year being discussed, ones which require teams to start races on the set of rubber with which they qualified.
And did I mention that we’re going to see a new Cup Series sponsor that will, most likely, bring less cash to the sport? Similar to terrorists, we know a new title sponsor is out there and about to sign a deal, but we don’t know who they are nor when they’ll pick up their pen.
Through all that, NASCAR’s television ratings continue to slump, with race attendance hovering at the lowest numbers we’ve seen in the past two decades. We can’t say for sure on the latter point; the sanctioning body stopped releasing attendance statistics several years ago. We can only go by the amount of empty seats we see each week.