INDIANAPOLIS — It was impossible not to smile. A blue-collar Oklahoma kid named Christopher Bell had nosed his Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota into the lead with just over a lap remaining in the second NASCAR Cup Series race of the season, on the Daytona Int’l Speedway road course, and you could almost hear the whooping and hollering in living rooms across America.
He took the white flag carrying the hopes and dreams of short-track fans by the tens of thousands. They’d seen Bell win in midgets, sprints, USAC Silver Crown cars and late models, and they watched him win a Camping World Truck Series title and 16 NASCAR Xfinity Series races.
Now, he was two minutes from his first Cup Series triumph. Those people rode that last lap with him, leaning forward on their sofas.
They cheered Bell’s victory in Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arkansas, California, Arizona, North Carolina and Missouri, because he’d won in all those places, too.
This was exactly how motorsports is supposed to go: A driver climbs the ladder and hauls a growing collection of fans up every rung. And that was a big part of how NASCAR Cup Series racing became, briefly, a mainstream happening. Grandstands expanded, and television ratings soared. But that was long ago and far away, before the people in charge of the sport lost the plot.
The formula was simple enough: Sit back and watch the hungriest short trackers claw their way toward the top. By the time they were ready for the majors, they’d have strong regional and national followings.
H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, the former Charlotte Motor Speedway president, used to keep a sharp eye on the minor leagues, especially the modified and late model divisions. He was always trying to steer team owners toward promising, popular drivers; yes, they had to be popular, or what was the point of the whole thing?
Wheeler’s most famous push was for Dale Earnhardt, who had just begun to blossom on the NASCAR late model sportsman circuit. Wheeler knew a few low-buck Cup Series owners willing to gamble on a brash newcomer, especially if the risk was offset with a quiet exchange of appearance money. It was no coincidence that four of Earnhardt’s first five Cup Series starts came at Charlotte.
Though Humpy liked Earnhardt, and admired the way he’d carried on after the 1973 loss of his father, NASCAR sportsman champ Ralph Earnhardt, this was not charity.
Wheeler knew that if the younger Earnhardt made even half a splash at the Cup Series level, Charlotte would draw not only his fans from tracks such as Metrolina and Hickory, but also the farmers and textile-mill hands who’d pulled for Ralph Earnhardt in years gone by.
Had Wheeler come along 40 years later, eyeballing NASCAR as the national sport Earnhardt helped it become, he’d have been all over Christopher Bell.
Today, in place of visionaries like Wheeler, the sport is lousy with marketing types who were toddlers when the old formula worked best. They can’t grasp the meaning of Bell’s midget wins in the Belleville Nationals or the Turkey Night Grand Prix, just as they’d never have seen the spark in a 1975-vintage Earnhardt. They are too focused on the imaginary “youth demographic” that they hope will one day resuscitate stock car racing.
It’s easy to shovel all the blame for this onto NASCAR and it certainly deserves its share. But save some scorn for team owners in all three of the sanctioning body’s top series. They, too, have bought into this insane youth movement, rushing anonymous teenaged drivers from feeder series to feeder series, where they race before pitiful crowds.
The best of them land truck rides, Xfinity rides, or, if they’re lucky, Cup Series rides. Hooray for them; it’s nice to see dreams realized. But because they arrive without anything resembling fan bases, their sudden presence adds nothing to the series they’ve parachuted into.
Meanwhile, we stare at NASCAR lineups and find ourselves impersonating Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy: “Who are those guys?” Sometimes we’ll add, “And why are they here?”
Across the 1990s and into the 2000s, you could walk through track infields and racing-friendly taverns and find fans willing to argue, fight and bleed for their favorite drivers. If you talked with these folks long enough, sooner or later you’d hear the declaration that said it all: “I liked him way before he got to Cup. We used to follow him when he was in modifieds,” or late models, or midgets or sprints.
In other words, this was no sudden attraction; these people had time and sweat invested in their heroes.
NASCAR fans are a loyal lot, but that loyalty has its limits. They won’t live and die for the next race if they feel no connection to the people in it.
The cunning political consultant James Carville boiled the 1992 presidential campaign down to one memorable phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
That, Carville knew, was what mattered to voters and his man, Bill Clinton, won. Well, if you want to explain what matters to race fans, and you don’t mind being as blunt and honest as Carville was, there’s no getting around it: It’s the drivers, stupid.
The best of the young ones, Christopher Bell included, give us hope. The rest of them give us cause to worry.