THE NASCAR BOOM

What should a television network provide for its viewers on New Year’s Day if it doesn’t have any bowl games?

For years, it was old John Wayne movies, “I Love Lucy” reruns or infomercials.

How about 24 hours of NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing? That’s what ESPN2 aired around last Jan. 1.

The sights and sounds of big (3,400 pounds) and loud (715-horsepower) American stock car look-alikes (Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac) with commercials all over their sheet metal, racing door handle-to-door handle at 200 mph have captivated audiences like no other motor racing series--and TV is exploiting its surging popularity.

Surfing the channels, it seems at times that NASCAR races or Benny Parsons, Eli Gold, John Kernan or Bob Jenkins talking with drivers about them is a 24-hour staple, New Year’s Day or any other. This season, there will be 84 nationally televised stock car races--34 Winston Cup, 26 Busch Grand National and 24 Craftsman Truck--on five TV networks: CBS, ABC, TNN, TBS and ESPN, including its ESPN2 sidekick.

That’s 25,000 miles’ worth. And most of the races will be rerun two or three times.

Last year, NASCAR races had a total viewership of more than 120 million, a 25% increase from 1994. Already this season, TNN, the Nashville Network, and ESPN have reported record auto racing audiences. The Goodwrench 400 from Rockingham, N.C., brought TNN a 5.4 rating, representing 3.5 million households; and the Pontiac Excitement 400 from Richmond, Va., had 3.67 million viewers.

The Daytona 500 received a 9.2 rating--8,840,000 households--on CBS. By comparison, Indy car races on ABC drew 2.8 for the Long Beach Grand Prix CART race and 2.2 for the Indy Racing League opener at Disney World.

“What I think Daytona does is give us a window on a lot of non-race fans,” TV announcer Ken Squier said.

Bob Eaton, ESPN managing editor, said, “TV hasn’t yet satisfied the appetite for racing of the NASCAR fan.”

Forbes magazine calls NASCAR racing “America’s fastest growing professional sport.” That’s not just motor sports, that’s all sports.

The financial impact is shown in Sponsors Report figures compiled by Joyce Julius of Ann Arbor, Mich., which indicate exposure value. Seventeen sponsors received more than $10 million worth, headed by Valvoline with $33.5 million; Winston, $30.1 million, and Chevrolet, $28.5 million.

On ESPN’s all-sports network, only NFL football outdrew Winston Cup racing in head-to-head competition.

Brian France, 33, NASCAR’s vice president for marketing and corporate communications, is a third-generation NASCAR official who oversees a vast network of money-making adventures fueled not only by television itself but by commercials tied to the sport. Estimated revenues for NASCAR last year were pegged at $2 billion.

Brian’s grandfather, Bill France, took a bunch of fast-driving moonshiners who raced Sundays on dusty back roads in the Carolinas for bragging rights and put them onto tracks where money could be collected to watch them. It was the start of NASCAR and before he turned over the key to son Bill Jr. in 1978, Bill had a stock car monopoly that was rivaling college football as the No. 1 sport in the Southeast.

Bill Jr. took his inheritance and set about expanding NASCAR nationally, even internationally. The Winston Cup, although still solidly entrenched in the South--with 21 of 31 races in Dixie--also strays to California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, New Hampshire and Arizona.

In November, NASCAR will race in Japan. Dale Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace recently tested there to an enthusiastic response.

Now Brian France is taking it another step.

“Our product has always been good, we just need to find better ways to expose it, especially to the non-racing fan,” the younger France said.

Confederate flags may wave above many Earnhardt backers, but when he visited Anchorage and Soldotna, Alaska, last June, he was besieged by thousands of fans for whom he signed autographs.

“Our drivers are our biggest asset in making fans,” France said. “Fans can get right down in the garage area with the drivers, where they can talk with them. Can you imagine a baseball fan wandering out on the sidelines to chat with Barry Bonds or Cal Ripken?”

Gigantic 18-wheel truck-transporters form a backdrop at every track, their sides plastered with the same commercial message found on the cars. As they crisscross the country, they become moving billboards.

“Corporate sponsorship is our most important ally, so we work closely with not only our race sponsors but also with team sponsors,” France said.

“We have a lot of space to offer on our uniforms and our cars. We need sponsors to exist, because of our costs. We can’t bring a stick and ball, throw it up in the air and play a game. Cars are expensive. Without sponsors, we would be hard pressed to have races.”

More and more, sponsors are coming from other than automotive products, beer and tobacco.

Hanna-Barbera and the Cartoon Network sponsor cars for Steve Grissom, with a caricature of Fred Flintstone on the hood of his Winston Cup car and a World Championship Wrestling logo on the Busch Grand National car.

“After seeing the popularity of NASCAR itself and looking at its opportunities, we’ve seen what types of things they haven’t been able to do yet, and one of things is to address kids and families,” said Tom Barreca, Hanna-Barbera Enterprises vice president. “Since that’s what we do, it was a perfect fit for us.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is another sponsor.

Said Katherine Prescott, MADD president: “This partnership is a natural one for MADD because it provides us with an opportunity to reach an audience that is captivated by motorsports, and the drivers of our race cars can help us emphasize the importance of responsibility when you get behind the wheel of an automobile.”

Demographics show that women make up 38% of NASCAR attendance, which perhaps accounts for such sponsors as Tide, Lipton Tea, Kmart, Family Channel, Spam and Lowe’s Home Improvement.

Lowe’s joined NASCAR last year as an experiment and, despite a poor performance by Junior Johnson’s team, stepped up its sponsorship of Brett Bodine’s car, even after Johnson retired and sold the team to Bodine.

“What absolutely shocked us was the behavioral changes that took place in the consumers who were impacted by our NASCAR sponsorship,” said Dale Pond, Lowe’s senior vice president. “The first year exceeded our initial expectations.

“Our consumers demonstrated an unbelievable affinity for Lowe’s and the Team Lowe’s racing concept . . . and supported it by increasing their purchases at our stores. They seem to like the fact that we are supporting NASCAR, and they seem to love the fact that they can be a part of it all.”

France also noted that NASCAR benefits from commercial sponsorship more than merely financially.

“You can’t go into a grocery store or a gas station without seeing life-sized cardboard cutouts of drivers like Terry Labonte holding a box of Kellogg’s cereal,” he said. “And every time DuPont or Havoline-Texaco airs a commercial with Jeff Gordon or Ernie Irvan, it’s like a commercial for NASCAR too.”

Another indication of its popularity was displayed in the response to Irvan’s head injury. After his wife, Kim, appeared on TV to talk about Irvan when he was still hospitalized, the family received 60,000 cards and letters from fans.

There is much more to NASCAR than its signature series, however, and most of it is grass-roots racing at local levels.

The Daytona Beach sanctioning body runs 12 professional series with more than 2,000 races, from the Featherlite Southwest Tour in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Colorado to the Reb-Co Northwest Tour in Oregon and Washington and the Featherlite Modified in New England.

The Winston Racing Series for weekly short-track racing encompasses 125 tracks. Included are Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino, Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield and Cajon Speedway, near San Diego.

“Television carries our message to every corner of the country, but fans the Winston Racing Series develops on Saturday nights at small tracks form a solid foundation to grow on,” France said.

To carry the message to a still wider audience, France is involved with an ambitious marketing program that will include:

--Opening seven NASCAR Thunder retail stores, starting with one in Atlanta next month to capitalize on Olympic trade. The 4,200-square-foot stores will have the look of a Winston Cup garage, with displays of show cars, driver uniforms and race car parts.

“They will be patterned after the Disney and Warner Bros. stores that sell logo merchandise,” France said. “We have found that NASCAR fans will buy just about anything that their favorite driver eats, drinks or wears.”

Or anything that sounds like a race car, as does an electric toothbrush.

--A chain of NASCAR Cafe restaurants, upscale eateries designed by Charles Daboub, who designed the Hard Rock Cafes. The first is scheduled for a Labor Day opening in Myrtle Beach, N.C.

--Speed Parks, similar to Malibu Grand Prix tracks, except that the scaled-down cars will be copies of Winston Cup cars and will be built by Jack Roush, who builds the Fords driven by Mark Martin, Jeff Burton and Ted Musgrave. The tracks, the first of which will open in Irvine, will be ovals with a stadium environment. The Irvine track is scheduled to open in late summer or early fall.

“Our sport has a disadvantage because kids can’t play it in high school, but everyone drives an automobile, so we will give them a chance to feel what it’s like in scaled-down model cars,” France said. “And there will be plenty of simulation games and films of Winston Cup races at each venue.”

--Collector cards, starting with a “premier edition” issued by Fleer/Sky Box International, makers of trading cards for baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Cards will include not only drivers, but also car owners, crew chiefs, race action, helmets and on-track action.

--Expansion of its MasterCard involvement, from which fans can get credit cards with the NASCAR logo or portraits of their favorite driver in the background. This year, MasterCard is conducting a poll to determine the greatest moments in NASCAR history. Results will be revealed at the Winston Cup awards banquet in New York next December.

Among the seven under consideration are the first Daytona 500 in 1959, when it took two days to determine that Lee Petty had beaten Johnny Beauchamp; the 1976 Daytona 500 in which Richard Petty and David Pearson crashed on the final turn, with Pearson limping to victory at 10 mph; Bill Elliott winning the Winston Million in 1985; Richard Petty winning his 200th race July 4, 1984, at Daytona; and the first Brickyard 400 in 1994, the first non-Indy car race held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“We think the voting will surpass anything done similarly in the NFL, NBA or major league baseball,” France said.

--And perhaps most significant, the introduction of NASCAR Online, its own site on the Internet, https:www.nascar.com.

“We started it without fanfare the week of the Daytona 500 and we got a million hits the first week, which I’m told is a very high number,” France said. “We give results from all 12 racing bodies, plus history, track conditions, driver [biographies], ticket prices and even a catalog to order merchandise.”

On March 31, less than two months after its debut, it had its first million-hit day. A hit is registered each time a caller accesses a different portion of a web site. The web site is averaging 17,000 users a day and 4.5 million hits a week.

During a race, Online is hooked in with the scoring computer system being used by Winston Cup officials to monitor and score the race.

Who would want something like that?

How about the Earnhardt fans who showed up at Daytona with their family motor home painted like Earnhardt’s car, complete with the big No. 3 and decals of his sponsors? The man, his wife and three children were all outfitted in Earnhardt regalia--caps, T-shirts, jackets, pants, even oversized No. 3 belt buckles.

“Come in and look around,” invited the woman. Inside, the walls were plastered with pictures of “the Intimidator,” his car, his wife and kids, his team. Even the curtains and the towels featured the GM Goodwrench car. Coffee mugs with Earnhardt’s mug on them were on the counter.

Kids’ model cars, No. 3 of course, littered the floor.

Everything was paid for with an Earnhardt MasterCard.

“We love Dale,” the woman understated.

And they weren’t Southeasterners. They had driven down from Schnectady, N.Y., to watch him race. You could tell they were not from Carolina. Instead of the Confederate flag waving, they had a huge black banner with EARNHARDT on it.

Part of the NASCAR family.

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Race to the Top

Between 1990 and 1994, NASCAR’s attendance has increased more than any other major sport.

*

Major League Baseball: -9%

National Football League: 0.5%

National Basketball Association: 10%

PPG Indy Car World Series: 20%

National Hockey League: 26%

NASCAR: 47%

* Source: NASCAR