Will we eventually see obvious effects of the death of NASCAR czar Bill France Jr.?
We already have, just in the time since France died June 4.
That very day, Kurt Busch committed an offense for which France likely would have parked him for the rest of the season. He forced a pit crewman to jump onto the hood of Tony Stewart’s parked car to avoid being hit as the raging Busch brushed alongside Stewart.
The penalty, announced the day after France’s funeral, was what has become a standard wrist slap: a $100,000 fine and a 100-point deduction.
The question arose again as Dale Earnhardt Jr. announced he would join NASCAR’s dominant team, Hendrick Motorsports.
Teaming Earnhardt with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson concentrates so much star power in one place that it might have been too much for France’s comfort. France probably would have found a way to keep that alignment from happening.
And now the sponsorship uproar among AT&T, Nextel and NASCAR has become a free-for-all of litigation.
On June 17, NASCAR filed a $100 million countersuit against AT&T, which won an injunction last month in Atlanta federal court to allow a change of brand logos on Jeff Burton’s car to AT&T from Cingular, a brand being discontinued.
The next day, AT&T counter-punched, announcing it had signed a three-year extension of its contract to sponsor Burton and his Richard Childress Racing team.
Yet to be heard from is Nextel, which in 2004 began a 10-year, $700 million deal to sponsor NASCAR’s elite Cup series. But grandfathered in were wireless providers Alltel and Cingular. NASCAR has maintained all along that the grandfather agreement did not allow for a wireless brand other than Cingular to be advertised on Burton’s car.
With the countersuit, NASCAR appears to be protecting its position with Nextel. What if Nextel and its parent company, Sprint, should decide to sue for breach of the exclusivity agreement and get out of the sponsorship deal?
Six more years remain on the contract, so NASCAR — and its member teams and drivers — could be out some big sponsorship money.
France, being as close to team owner Richard Childress as he was for 30 years, might have summoned Childress to dinner. Maybe they would have worked something out before the litigation got so hot that the law firms are making more money than drivers.
But upon further consideration …
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Maybe not even a czar like France was could have stopped the forces that play on a vastly larger and more complex NASCAR today.
In 2002, after Stewart thumped a photographer in the garage area at Indianapolis after a race, word from inside was that France wanted him suspended for the rest of that season.
But younger members of NASCAR’s inner council knew this was not like throwing out some good ol’ boy of yore and telling some small-time sponsor to take a hike.
This was Stewart, a skyrocketing star whose absence would create a nationwide uproar and be mentioned every Sunday on race telecasts. And this was Home Depot, a huge corporation and huge sponsor, not only of Stewart but of NASCAR itself.
So maybe now, even with such an egregious offense by Busch, France’s iron fist couldn’t have come down on racing mogul Roger Penske and sponsoring Miller Brewing Co.
Maybe with such a national microscope placed on the five-week free agency of Earnhardt Jr., there could have been no back-room manipulation, even by France as chieftain.
Certainly, it was one thing to run off some small manufacturer of off-brand automotive products as a sponsor. It is quite another to stare down a monster corporation like AT&T.
France in his time told an awful lot of people what to do, and he meant it. And they did it, or else.
That doesn’t work with federal judges.
As the AT&T storms intensify in the federal Northern District of Georgia, threatening NASCAR’s long-running dictatorship over who may or may not be a sponsor and under what brand, the horizon holds even more ominous clouds in the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Kentucky Speedway’s lawsuit, which once merely sought a Cup race date from NASCAR, has turned into a straight-up antitrust action.
Veteran observers long have wondered whether NASCAR could stand federal-court scrutiny under the Sherman Act, what with the France family owning NASCAR outright and also controlling International Speedway Corp., which owns 12 of the 22 tracks on the Nextel Cup tour.
So maybe now the storms buffeting NASCAR are reaching such typhoon force that not even France firmly at the helm could steer a steady course.
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