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Keep Mustang Out of the Cup Series

by Steve Wronkowicz

I am co-host of the syndicated radio show: ON PIT ROW. Over ten years on the air and three on the net; see what can happen when I don't let the facts get in the way of my opinions.

January 31, 2011 7:47 am CST 2 Comments

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NASCAR can make Jekyll and Hyde look well balanced.

Their new points system doesn’t change the way it rewards winning like they were professing. NASCAR continually talks about listening to the fans and making changes to appease them. Somehow many of their intentions fall short.

2010 saw the elimination of the dreaded wing; something fans really seemed to hate, even though most of their street cars sported a cosmetic rear wing on their front-wheel drive cars. NASCAR got this one right. Not only did fans loathe the wing but most of the teams weren’t too crazy about it either.

2011 sees the re-desingn of the front fascia and elimination of the splitter; making the Sprint Cup cars look more like the models they are trying to represent.

Re-working the front and back of the Cup cars is a precursor to wholesale change expected for the 2013 Cup season. 2011 sees the first full season of new models in the Nationwide Series with the integration of the Mustang and Challenger. The Ford and Dodge representatives as that series Car of Tomorrow, is intended to give that series another unique quality.

Now Ford executives are sending up a trial balloon to check fan and NASCAR reaction to using the Mustang as their model in the Sprint Cup Series in 2013. According to Jamie Allison, Ford’s director of motorsports; “Mustang is the most identifiable brand we have in terms of racing and motorsports. So we’ve made it known that we’d like to see Mustang in NASCAR.”

Allison is correct and all the more reason NOT to allow that model to represent Ford in the Cup Series. Here is where NASCAR needs to step up and stop their need to continually change the sport. If you look back at Cup racing throughout history it revolves around auto makers large to mid-size sedans and that is where it should remain. Before the Fusion; Ford has campaigned the Taurus, Thunderbird, Torino and Galaxie dating back to the sixties.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much that Ford wants to take its MOST recognizable brand to the Cup Series; as it wants to take its ONLY recognizable brand to the Cup Series. The problem isn’t just with Ford. NASCAR fans have complained since the inception of the CoT that the cars are all the same except for the front and rear decals that give the cars their brand identity.

Has anyone driven down the street lately? It’s pretty difficult to differentiate between the consumer versions of the Camry, Fusion, Impala and Charger. Instead of bringing the Mustang, Challenger and Camaro into Cup, NASCAR should continue to keep a separate, unique and identifiable brand in their premier series. NASCAR has said throughout this off-season they want The Nationwide Series to have an identity of their own. Making its top two series into “pony car” series will undermine that goal.

2013 should see a return to identifiable sheet metal in the Cup Series. Make the cars use stock factory parts for the roof, trunk and hood; and keep a close tolerance to stock appearing front and rear fascia. That would get the fans off NASCAR’s back. No one is under the delusion that the cars are stock; but please let’s maintain a unique identity in the Sprint Cup Series, while returning to a more stock-like series.

Photo credit: JAB/On Pit Row.com

Filed under: Car of Tomorrow, Chase for the Cup, Dale Earnhardt Jr., How to fix NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR Bidness, NASCAR History, Sprint Cup Series

Tagged with: Chevy racing, Dodge, Ford Racing, Toyota Motorsports

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Hey NASCAR: Shaun White Wants to Drive!

by Charlie Turner

Thanks for stopping by OnPitRow.com and the Bench Racing with Steve and Charlie blog. The best NASCAR and IndyCar news and opinion, exclusive pictures and video. I'm Charlie Turner. Follow me on Twitter @onpitrow

January 29, 2011 10:48 pm CST No Comments

Unless your head has been buried in basketball this past week, you almost had to see the B F Goodrich Tires TV campaign featuring Winter X Games super star snow boarder Shaun White.

Shaun White wants to drive. Right now, it seems he’s considering giving rallying a go. And rally style racing seems a fit for White. All auto racing is extreme, but rallying and rally-cross have a place already in The X Games. And Shaun White has made more out of X Game fame than anyone.

According to Bloomberg Business Week’s Power 100, Shaun White is the 2nd most powerful figure in sports. Really.

And if Shaun White is going racing, NASCAR should try to get him. For the Nationwide Series.

NASCAR gets plenty of negative pub concerning the state of their game. There has been a dip in enthusiasm for the big show - The Sprint Cup Series. That is not the subject here though.

The bright and shining star of the France Family portfolio going forward could be the Nationwide Series. NASCAR has consistently claimed that the NNWS is a development series. They’ve even made a significant rule change to encourage driver development by forcing drivers to choose just one series to compete for a championship.

Fan Development More Important than Driver Development

NASCAR will never need a series to develop driver talent. Sprint Cup is North America’s number one auto racing series. Nothing is close. Everything else in racing feeds it. It’s where the money is and driver talent will always follow the money.

Fans are another story. The perception has been that fans only come out - in big numbers - to see the stars of Sprint Cup. There have been plenty of ideas floated for fixing the NNWS. The complaints that so-called Busch-wackers from the Sprint Cup ranks robbed NNWS of any shot at an identity led to the new single championship rule. For the first time since Martin Truex Jr won his Busch Series crown, a non-Cup driver will be NNWS Champ in 2011. But who?

And will anyone really care?

Dale Earnhardt Jr and Red Bull have the Right Idea

A few years ago, Earnhardt Jr started providing one of his JR Motorsports late models for motocross super star Ricky Carmichael. Carmichael is known as GOAT. GOAT as in Greatest Of All Time, in motocross. The GOAT has had limited success in NASCAR, but he brought new fans with him.

Then in 2009 Junior made big news by signing IndyCar star Danica Patrick to his NNWS team. Again, new fans and big pub show up whenever Danica races in her NNWS car.

Late in 2010, Red Bull Racing - a big sponsor in Extreme Sports - announced the signing of Extreme racer and daredevil Travis Pastrana to a NNWS contract for 2010. Pastrana has a huge fan base and brings a vibe to the NNWS that it needs in order to carve a niche.

So if Shaun White wants to drive, NASCAR should find a way to get him if they can. New blood. New fans. Growth.

Photo credit: Icon Sports Media, Inc.

Filed under: Danica Patrick, JR Motorsports, NASCAR, NASCAR & the Media, NASCAR Rumors, Nationwide Series, Red Bull Racing

Tagged with: B F Goodrich, Extreme sports, rally, Ricky Carmichael, Shaun White, Travis Pastrana, X Games

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No Lyin’: Why It’s Hard To Stay Positive

by Chris Leone, Special To NASCAR commentary and driver pictures, 2011 NASCAR schedule, video, Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

I do weekly Fantasy Pick'Em columns here at OPR, as well as the occasional opinion and analysis piece. I also provide the IZOD IndyCar Series coverage. For more on that, head to my site, OpenWheelAmerica.com. My Twitter handle is @christopherlion.

January 29, 2011 12:42 pm CST 4 Comments

Hey everyone, long time no talk. How’s it going? Hope your offseason has been restful and relaxing, because we’re poised for yet another 10-month grind in this NASCAR season.

Things always kick off with winter testing at Daytona and the annual Media Tour, a good time that’s been brought to the fans, finally, through the advent of social media technologies like Twitter. It’s usually a grand old time with some fun stories to tell, like Joe Gibbs‘ tales of trying to get a hold of Tony Stewart to sign him in the late 1990s when the driver had multiple girlfriends. “Don’t come back to the 20-year reunion,” Stewart quipped.

But like all good parties, there has to be at least one downer moment, and this year’s came from FOX color commentator Larry McReynolds. When speaking to the members of the media, Larry Mac incited a collective groan with his urge for writers to “be more positive” when covering the sport.

Well, since he first uttered those words, I’ve vehemently disagreed with him; it’s just taken me a little bit of time to reflect on exactly why. I would love to be more positive about the sport, but quite frankly, I don’t know that we’re in a position to do so with the way things are right now.

Look, I know I’m repeating myself for the hundredth time or so when I say that the sport isn’t where it was in the mid-to-late 1990s, and I know everyone knows that fact anyway. Everybody knows things are bad. But therein lies the point. We can certainly be optimistic for the future, that NASCAR will turn things around with this latest round of rules changes, but that doesn’t mean we should be Kool-Aid drinkers or paint a nicer picture than we’ve got right now.

Listen - the job of a journalist is to be accurate and tell the truth in a responsible manner to his or her audience. Now, your definition of that may be different than mine; in fact, it probably is. But the way that I interpret that title is, if I see something wrong, not only do I have an obligation to report that to you, but I also have the obligation to make my own suggestions to make things better. No, it’s not the “positivity” that Larry Mac talks about, but at least it’s constructive.

I’ll give you an example. NASCAR has moved the start times of its Chase races back to 2 PM ET to try and boost its slumping TV ratings against NFL games. The prevailing idea seems to be “get the fans to watch the endings of the races.” But the truth of the matter is, that move doesn’t make any sense.

NFL games start at 1 PM ET, and there are two of them - on CBS and FOX - at that point. There’s usually another 4 PM game as well, if not two, before NBC’s Football Night in America. Now, usually those 1 PM games are the Games of the Week, meaning they’re generally good games, and if one’s a dud, fans will normally change to the other, not to the NASCAR race. They’ll also be more likely to stick with football at 4 PM than shift to another sporting event where they’ve missed the majority of it.

On the other hand, if NASCAR shifted the majority of Chase races to 12 PM ET, they’d create an hour of basically unopposed racing that would prove valuable to fans and advertisers alike. If that first hour of racing is a great battle, then the fans will stay tuned in; even if not, there’s an hour of prime advertising space that would make a lot of money. Maybe the races wouldn’t hold the entire audience for the duration of the event, but it’s a start.

Granted, Larry Mac isn’t a journalist, per se. He’s more of a promoter, a talking head on TV whose primary job is to illuminate fans on some of the inner workings of the race team and pit strategy from the point of view of a former crew chief. But that’s just another reason why I disagree with what he’s saying. FOX is not going to pay him to criticize the sport on air, obviously, because that’s not what a promoter does.

On the other hand, digging up dirt and causing problems are the hallmarks of any good journalist. Think of it as the Fourth Estate of government - the people keeping the government in check by exposing issues and enlightening a broader audience about them. That’s what the best racing journalists have been doing as NASCAR’s been slipping; that’s what they will - should - continue to do.

And I’m sorry, Larry Mac, but I think my philosophy has a lot more value to the sport than drinking the Kool Aid does.

Filed under: NASCAR, NASCAR & the Media

Tagged with: Larry McReynolds, NASCAR Media Tour

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Solving NASCAR issues with Bonus Points

by Steve Wronkowicz

I am co-host of the syndicated radio show: ON PIT ROW. Over ten years on the air and three on the net; see what can happen when I don't let the facts get in the way of my opinions.

January 25, 2011 12:33 pm CST 1 Comment

NASCAR is looking to simplify their points system in all three national touring series.

Carl Edwards trophy Phoenix International Raceway 10

The thinking on NASCAR’s part is the fans have a hard time understanding the current system. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with the current system. After all; it has served the sport well for decades. Revisions to the current system however could improve it and give the fans what they want–more emphasis on wins.

The powers that be at NASCAR are in and have been in a “change is good” mode for several years. Good, bad or indifferent–Brian France and his charges have seen change as the cure for the sport. Lets look at a new points system for the Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series and see what makes sense.

Speculation for a new system revolves around what is being referred to as the “43 system” where the winning car receives forty-three points and every place under that receives one few than the spot above down to the forty-third place finisher who receives one point.

This system; in its strictest form does nothing to give the fans more emphasis on winning. If anything it reduces that aspect of the current system. So how can NASCAR simplify the system and reward winners?

Lets take the basic 43 system and make a couple of simple changes. First lets look at the bottom of the finishing order; the area inhabited by the start and park teams. The merits of these SaP teams has been debated before and that’s for another time. But they are here to stay so in my points system places 41, 42 and 43 each earn two points. Places 36 through 40 each earn five points, in an effort to keep badly damaged cars from returning to the track.

Keeping damaged cars from returning to the track will reduce yellow flags and debris cautions. This one is for the drivers and crews, as many have listed the returning lame car as one of their biggest pet peeves.

We move back to the top of the leader board, where the winner will receive 43 points, the second place car 42 and so on down the line. But because we like to see racing throughout the event, one bonus point should continue to be given to the car that leads the most laps and FIVE bonus points are to be given to the winner for a green flag victory.

This puts the emphasis on the drivers to race for wins and yet would reduce the possibility of the kamikaze finish on a third Green-White-Checker attempt. Rain shortened events would receive the “kissing your sister” recognition they deserve.

Photo credit: BethAnne Heisler/On Pit Row

Filed under: Camping World Truck Series, How to fix NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR Bidness, NASCAR Rumors, Nationwide Series, On Pit Row The Fastest Two Hours on Radio, Sprint Cup Series, The Fast Lap

Tagged with: bonus points, Green-White-Checkers, start and parkers

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2012, I mean, 2011 NASCAR Astro-Predictions

by Clance' McClannahan, Special To NASCAR commentary and driver pictures, 2011 NASCAR schedule, video, Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

Clance' McClannahan, famous author behind The Church of The Great Oval and also one of the much appreciated Contributing Authors at Thunder Lounge.

January 25, 2011 11:24 am CST 2 Comments

2012, I mean 2011 is a very special year, both Numerologically and Astrologically.

Are you curious about how your driver is going to do? Is Jimmie Johnson going to win again? How will Dale Jr. fare? Tony Stewart has already started his year a bit aggressively…Will Smoke be smoking hot in 2012? I mean, 2011? Will Brooklyn’s affect on new Daddy Ryan Newman change the way he drives? What about Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski, and Carl Edwards? Will they continue to drive as phenomenally, now that they have had to choose which series they will earn point in? Will the feuds continue?

I dare YOU to use my prediction’s in your Fantasy Racing.

I dare ME to remember to play.

I dare Charlie to beat me.

I dare Steve to prove he is not an Idiot.

I dare ALL the Stat guys to a challenge of accuracy.

Stats vs. ‘Scope’s.

2011, I mean 2010, brought us some of the most exciting racing in years. Will the changes in NASCAR rules, affect the excitement for the fans, or dampen it? Will it be possible that actually winning races will matter?

We will be taking a look at all the full time NASCAR Driver’s for the first six months of the season tomorrow. I will also be looking at the year and make my predictions as to who may be the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion. I have to do it early, so no one can say I cheat. Oops. 2011. So far this year I am losing in the accuracy challenge. By a year. I was spot on last year…

Well, not quite. Only 97%.

It’s tough to be a Goddess. ~ Me.

WTH?

Filed under: NASCAR, NASCAR Astro-Predictions, NASCAR Fantasy Gaming, NASCAR Predictions, Nascaholics

Tagged with: Brad Keselowski, Carl Edwards, Charlie Turner, Clance' McClannahan, jimmie johnson, Kyle Busch, NASCAR Astro-Predictions, NASCAR astrology, NASCAR Predictions, ON PIT ROW, One and Done, One and Done NASCAR Fantasy Racing, Ryan Newman, Steve Wronkowicz, Tony Stewart

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Print Your Own On Pit Row 2011 NASCAR Calender

by Charlie Turner

January 25, 2011 10:52 am CST No Comments

Printable 2011 NASCAR Race Dates and Driver Birthdays

Click the thumbnails to view the 2011 Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series race dates and find your favorite driver’s birthday from the pages of the 2011 OnPitRow.com calender.

Every year BethAnne puts these calenders together for the staff and select friends of the On Pit Row radio show. We thought some of you might like a copy too. Below the photo gallery are links to individual PDFs of each month. Just download them and make a calender all your own. Enjoy.