The fanatic masses. Since the early s, when the marketing of NASCAR hit its peak along with the popularity of the sport nationwide, attendance and viewership has been on the decline. Tracks accustomed to selling out, like Daytona International for the Coke Zero held annually on July 4, have seen a percent drop in attendance. Going national and alienating its origins. Greg Fielden, a Charlotte, N. That identity has fallen by the wayside of late for a bevy of reasons, one of which being that the sport has gone national.
Kurt Busch, the winner, hails from Nevada; Tony Stewart, who won in , is an Indiana native, and Jimmie Johnson, winner of the last three championships, is from California.
According to Dutton, there is no single reason for the disenchantment, but a piling of all the rule changes on top of the identity crisis, makes a difference. Soon enough, they learned to outrun one another. And then people saw the dust, and they came and started watching. And then promoters came along building fences and charging people to watch. After Prohibition was long dead and the black market that financed moonshine-era stock car racing had dried up, automotive brands and tobacco companies began sponsoring races.
In , the cigarette brand Winston poured millions of dollars of advertising into tracks, large and small, around the country. Jade Gurss, who is Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Reynolds Tobacco Co. The late Dale Sr. To compete, you needed a car and a dedicated mechanic to enhance it before races and to repair it afterward. Stock car racing, being the contact sport that it is, gets frightfully expensive in terms of upkeep. From one generation to the next, established racing families grow somewhat more cavalier to the financial costs and physical risks of stock car racing than your average American household.
A high school dropout, France uprooted from his hometown, Washington, D. First, France found work as a mechanic. Gradually, competitive drivers flocked to his garage, and France started organizing beach races from there. Initially, promoters, including France, organized races ad hoc; there was no formalized schedule, no annual competitions, and no league standings. There were simply winners and payouts, funded by ticket sales and—until Congress repealed Prohibition in —bootlegger revenue. For the first half of the 20th century, the American Automobile Association was the only official organization sanctioning races across the country.
Bill Jr. The late Bill Jr. Last year, France stumped for Donald Trump on the campaign trail. To this day, a loud minority of fans contest the ban, and it is subject of renewed passions following the recent violence surrounding the planned removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia. At a race at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee last weekend, several fans defied the ban, flying the Confederate flag from their campground tents and trailers.
When NASCAR grew into being a national sport, new short tracks and other racing facilities began to pop up in places that had never truly embraced stock car racing. At the same time, some of the historic facilities in the South began to fall into disrepair. The number of races dwindled, fans stayed away and opportunities for aspiring young Southern drivers began to dry up.
But the track slowly began to lose its luster in the s and finally shut down in The facility was demolished a year later, and now there is an indoor swimming and track and field facility on the site. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Stenhouse said he definitely has a significant number of fans who support him because of his Southern roots.
They all stick together. So it's cool to have them behind me. It's those people who help our sport keep going. They're dedicated. They're the ones who are traveling and taking their campers and tents to a bunch of tracks. They're the die-hard fans. Being from Mississippi, I feel like we have that connection with them. We believe strongly that the old, Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence. But we also realize that there's going to have to be an effort on our part to convince others to understand that.
Last year he instigated a good old-fashioned donnybrook with Clint Bowyer, the kind of fight the Allison brothers might have been proud of.
And maybe, just maybe, a sport that can bring the wild-eyed Southern boy out of a pitchman like Jeff Gordon is exactly what they need in Las Vegas, California and Michigan. Enjoy our content? Join our newsletter to get the latest in sports news delivered straight to your inbox!
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