“Your ad here.”
A NASCAR driver has just fallen out of the race with a blown something or other and television takes you live to the garage area for a report.
TV pit reporter: “Tough day for you, Freddie.”
Driver: “Yeah, well, the Jiffy Performance Plus $19.95 Oil Change Ford Taurus was running great all day long and we knew we were about to move up fast from 37th place until we blew the engine in the middle of the first lap. I’m real disappointed, most of all, for the people at Jiffy and our other sponsors, Bull’s-Eye Barbecue Sauce, Velveeta Cheese–featuring the new cheese-‘n’-crackers snack pack available at supermarkets everywhere–and I can’t leave out Speedy Flakes, the Laxative Cereal of Champions. Sorry, guys. We’ll get ’em next week.”
TV reporter (suppressing a gag): “Well, there you have it. Back to the booth.”
That sort of thing “has to stop,” says the savviest promoter in all of NASCAR, H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte.
Because their interviews are live, TV people have a hard time avoiding the shameless commercial babbling. It’s easier in the print media–you just don’t quote the guy. But either way, the public doesn’t get what it really wants: an idea of what the driver really thinks about a situation. He’s too consumed with selling you something.
“These PR people don’t know what they’re doing,” Wheeler says of the army of hucksters who surround virtually every driver.
Hard-core audiences of cable networks tolerated what amounted to blatant insults of viewer intelligence. More general audiences won’t stand for it and will remedy the situation with a flick of the remote control, the wisest moguls of stock-car racing fear.
In 2001, courtesy of the new TV package that begins with the Feb. 18 Daytona 500, Fox and NBC will be going for a vast audience of new viewers. Though the ratings goals are being stonewalled by the networks and NASCAR, the inside consensus is that Fox and NBC must pull consistent 7.0 ratings for Winston Cup races to support the far more expensive commercial time now being sold–as much as four times the old ESPN rate of $45,000 for a 30-second spot.
So NASCAR must choose: Will it continue to allow instant gratification of team sponsors, thereby turning off new audiences and damaging its new TV package? Or will it mandate a cleanup, woo viewers who haven’t cared before, attract more sponsorship on the TV commercial side and thereby take its final giant step into mainstream America?
Because NASCAR is so addicted to corporate sponsorship that it will go along with virtually whatever sponsors want, the answer likely lies with the corporations themselves.
And they should start, Wheeler said, by recognizing that their old modus operandi has been backfiring for years. Wheeler says they “absolutely” should re-examine the marketing and PR people they employ.
“You hire a PR agency to get you publicity–more seconds on TV, more column inches in the newspapers or whatever,” he says. “If you have some dodo driver standing there, and he’s never quoted, what do you really get out of it?”
Bill France Jr., the NASCAR czar whose iron hand has slackened in recent years, was fond of repeating the business bromide that “you can’t stand still; you must either move forward or backward.”
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So NASCAR can encourage its drivers to be candid and colorful, as Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip and a much younger Dale Earnhardt were when they said what they thought and took the sport to higher and higher levels of appeal. Or NASCAR can keep up the hucksterism and risk that the heralded new TV exposure will be a monumental flop.
Help on the way? Willy T. Ribbs, whose glib tongue and relentless candor would be a major boon to NASCAR’s personality doldrums, just might be driving to the rescue. He’ll compete in the Craftsman Truck Series this year for Bobby Hamilton Racing.
Ribbs tested a Dodge truck at Daytona International Speedway last weekend, and his speeds were in the 180-m.p.h. range, impressive considering that Ribbs has almost no experience in NASCAR.
In 1991 Ribbs became the first–and only–African-American driver to qualify for the Indianapolis 500.
Since then his efforts to break full time into open-wheel racing have been thwarted by a lack of sponsorship from corporate America because, some think, of his race–a rationale Ribbs himself refuses to embrace.
“[But] if they’re looking for a driver with the personality of an aardvark, I’m not their man,” Ribbs has said of corporations.
In the current climate, Ribbs is precisely what NASCAR and its sponsors need. “The fact that you have people making so many milquetoast comments throws the door wide open for somebody [candid] to come in and blow everybody off,” Wheeler said.
An aside: Wheeler first brought Ribbs to NASCAR as a prodigy out of San Jose, Calif., in 1978. But Ribbs and Wheeler fell out over Ribbs’ unabashedly wild approach to the sport–including leading Charlotte police on a merry chase one night in a rental car–and Ribbs departed, miffed at the whole thing. In the ride Wheeler had designated for Ribbs at Charlotte that May, Ribbs was replaced by a little-known driver at the time, a struggling short-tracker named Dale Earnhardt.
Moving into mainstream: Diversity being another commodity blatantly lacking in NASCAR, Petty’s new Craftsman Truck Series driver, Carlos Contreras, and Ribbs could help NASCAR move further into the mainstream. Contreras, 30, is from Mexico City, and who better to nurture his career than Petty?
Toughing it out: With the Paris-Dakar Rally the toughest race in the world on drivers physically, Jutta Kleinschmidt’s victory last weekend wipes out any remaining skepticism about the capabilities of women as racers. There is no more brutal pounding than the hundreds of miles across North African desert and vehicles often succumb in the middle of nowhere to the awful conditions.
Indeed, Kleinschmidt, a 38-year-old German, noted the key.
“The car was very solid, but it was not the fastest,” she said of her Mitsubishi.
NASCAR has some hope on the female-driver front too: Shawna Robinson, a veteran of lesser racing series, plans to enter at least five Winston Cup events this season, beginning with the Cracker Barrel 500 on March 11 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Bottom line: Though NASCAR has been cordial in recent years in its reception of females and minorities as participants–Patty Moise as a Busch Series driver, and former NFL star Joe Washington, NBA Hall of Famer Julius Erving, former NBA star Brad Daugherty and Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee and husband Bob Kersee as team owners–NASCAR hasn’t taken significant action in helping acquire sponsorship. Thus, none of those efforts has come to fruition.
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Ed Hinton can be reached at [email protected]