Local kid tells us nothing ....Local kid takes the championship.
S~
Who was it ?
No link to look at .
Local kid tells us nothing ....Local kid takes the championship.
S~
How much use do these tracks get when there isn't a big race? Do they sit idle most of the year?And, Dover Motorsports (owner of Dover and Nashville) cashes in its chips and sells out to SMI.
This leaves only the silly road course events in Austin and Elkhart Lake (Austin is a track rental, managed by SMI), the new event at Gateway/St. Louis, Indianapolis (which is a track rental by NASCAR) and the now single event at Pocono (which is rumored to be gone in a year or two) outside the ownership of NASCAR (the old ISC) or SMI.
If we define "big race" as NASCAR, Indy Car, IMSA, and F1, it is safe to say that that constitutes 99% of the track's income. The rest is just stuff like at Bristol they put up Christmas lights you can drive around the bottom of the track to see or Martinsville has a swap meet. Stuff like that. A few places might get an outdoor concert or two. Might get a commercial or something filmed. Indy has a museum and you can ride a bus around the place.How much use do these tracks get when there isn't a big race? Do they sit idle most of the year?
Do any of these places actually make money?If we define "big race" as NASCAR, Indy Car, IMSA, and F1, it is safe to say that that constitutes 99% of the track's income. The rest is just stuff like at Bristol they put up Christmas lights you can drive around the bottom of the track to see or Martinsville has a swap meet. Stuff like that. A few places might get an outdoor concert or two. Might get a commercial or something filmed. Indy has a museum and you can ride a bus around the place.
Mostly they just sit 50 weeks a year.
Well, they used to. Short history.Do any of these places actually make money?
How do team owners make their money? Are they hurting too?Well, they used to. Short history.
Most tracks belong to either NASCAR or SMI. Until recently these were publicly traded companies. ISC and SMI (NASCAR was then separate from ISC, but really its the same thing). They were both taken private getting ready for the coming TV deal.
Under the TV deal, the tracks get a substantial portion of the network $$. They were both solidly profitable companies.
The TV deal runs out after the 24 season. NASCAR has run off about 2 out of every 3 viewers it had at the time the last contract was signed, not to mention the whole industry wide "cord cutting" shift and all of that. Most people expect it will get about 1/3rd the money the next time around. I think it will be more like 1/5th. NASCAR 21's overall TV ratings are, again, a new record low, leaving out last year (which, BTW, should have been very high as the sport had the world to itself for almost 2 months, but were not).
Jimmy Johnson stated this week that driver's salaries are ALREADY down 50% from their peak, due to declining popularity.
Certainly.How do team owners make their money? Are they hurting too?
I still feel NASCAR's biggest problem is they simply can't race these things on the tracks they've got and are suffering from competition from streaming.Certainly.
Team owners make money two ways. What they win by on-track performance, but most importantly by what they are paid by the advertisers.
It is way down.
Way down.
NASCAR has run off 2 of every 3 viewers it once had in slightly over a decade. If you are McDonald's or FedEX or Coca-Cola, well there you go.
And, again, this all comes back to the expiration of the TV contract after 24. IMHO, NASCAR will end up not only getting far less $$, but will end up on maze of complex off-beat channels and streaming services. How much is a main advertiser willing to pay for a race only a couple of hundred thousand will see behind an internet paywall? Why not buy 1000 more billboards along I-40 or 1000 more minutes of radio jingles?
Most observers believe that in the future teams will have shops that have only a few employees. Already, next year, NASCAR is switching from the current car to yet another "next gen" car. While NASCAR cars, since they stopped really being "stock" in the mid 60s, have been hand built by the teams, these are spec-mobiles that will be made in a factory in NC and sold to the teams. The "fabrication" part of the race teams have already been shut down and the people mostly fired.
It is going to get a lot worse.