Kyle Busch was the surprise pole winner for Saturday night's Bank of America 500, as the Charlotte Motor Speedway track record was obliterated in a wave of speed.
Busch's No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota was the most consistent of the cars over three rounds, as he ran 197.390 miles per hour in the final session to take his third pole of the year.
Those speeds last night were absolutely incredible. And, brother Kurt set a new 1-lap stock car speed record for a 1-1/2 mile track any time, any place. Those Charlotte lap speeds are over 30 mph faster than when I used to stand on pit road there. I think NASCAR is headed in the right direction next year putting the brakes on a bit. Remains to be seen whether their methods will produce better racing.
Kurt Busch's fast lap of 198.771 mph was 40.022 mph faster than David Pearson's pole winning run of 158.749 mph for the same race in 1974. Unbelievable!
And those races with 159 mph poles produced many more lead changes than you could possibly see tonight.
Well, none of that euphoria carried over the the Nationwide race 'crowd'.........Holy Moly! What if they gave a race and nobody came? Back in the Sam Ard era, that race was about packed.
Went out to dinner & tuned in late. Wife walked in den. She mentioned good crowd. Had to explain the multi-colored seats now at Charlotte to make it look like there were spectators.
Seriously, if spectator appeal don't improve, how can the "number 2" series continue to have value? I know, at the moment, there's the TV angle, and it "don't matter if we have any fans in the stands or not..........we still got the TV money........" The NNS TV numbers are hardly earth-shattering, and it only delays the inevitable. If nobody's watching, in any medium, how does anything have value to sponsors?
It is absolutely beyond me how any sponsor today justifies the sponsorship cost in a major racing series against the return. In 1983, for instance, my Wrangler budget included $800,000 to sponsor Bud Moore for a full Winston Cup season with Dale Earnhardt, who was being paid about $125,000 for a personal services contract. A dollar here and a dollar there and we were spending a million dollars on the Cup sponsorship to owner and driver. Our entire ad budget that year was approximately $17 million. We were spending about 3 times the Cup sponsorship on advertising and promoting the sponsorship, which took it up to $4 million. That didn't include customer tickets, suites, Busch Series sponsorships to Robert Gee and Ed Whittaker. The entire cost of our Richmond Cup race sponsorship was being paid by Cluett-Peabody Co., owner of the Sanforized and SanforSet processes to keep denim from shrinking and wrinkling. Throw in travel, etc. and we were spending probably $5-$6 million for a total program... about 35% of our ad budget. We had full grandstands and wonderful blind customer survey numbers. I guess a minimum figure today would be $20-30 million just to get your feet wet. Back then, we had full car sponsorship, no associates, for the entire season. Again, I don't understand how a company can justify it.
Bobby, below is how I laid out our 1983 Wrangler racing sponsorships to our retailers. How much of this would $5-$6 million buy today?
5 to 6 million would be roughly 14 million today. From what I read, it would take 20 to 30 million to sponsor a Hendrick or Penske car for a full season. So you could get Brad Keselowski but not Jimmie Johnson. The difference being that Miller does 24 of 36 races and I think Lowe's does the full season.
That said, I think the 14 million quoted is all to the team and you were giving maybe 20% of your 6 million to the team. As I've said before, I think the carousel of sponsors and paint jobs diminishes the value of sponsorship by eliminating easy identification. You can look at a 1 inch square picture and immediately identify the Wrangler Chevy, STP Pontiac or Rainbow Warrior. With a new color every week, can you do that with the Lowe's Chevy? How about ten years from now?
I know which of these cars you could pick out from the stands on the Daytona and Talladega backstretch and which you couldn't:
