 | | Michael Waltrip is guaranteed a starting spot through the first five races, a benefit from an offseason deal. Credit: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images |
By Marty Smith, NASCAR.COM
February 10, 2006
11:37 AM EST (16:37 GMT)
Nextel Cup Series team owners are in a difficult position. When the getting's good, it's really good. But what's a guy to do when the sponsorship well dries up? Unlike the National Football League, Major League Baseball or the National Basketball Association, there is no franchising in NASCAR. It's free-enterprise business. Everyone is an independent contractor, meaning team owners assume all financial responsibility involved in fielding a car in NASCAR-sanctioned events.  | 
 | TAKE THE CHALLENGE | Give the right side of your brain the day off as you juggle a field of NASCAR drivers while staying under a salary cap.
For Reese's, it's all about the Cup. Pick the best drivers from each group and walk away with the top prize. Build your point total week after week! Earn great prizes! Are you ready to make the hard choices?
Streak to the Finish challenges you to guess a top-10 driver in next week's NASCAR race.
Who do you want to make a superstar? The Superstar Fantasy Cap Challenge gives you that power. Just don't use the same driver twice this year.
Play the Ultimate Fantasy League. Draft, trade, add, and drop drivers throughout the season. Dominate your opponents with the best team of drivers you can assemble.
|
|
Parts. Pieces. Personnel. Engines. Chassis. Real estate. Travel. Transportation. Entry fees. Everything. Therefore, if a team is unable to secure ample sponsorship backing -- and thus can't compete -- there is no revenue stream, no guarantee for a return on the investment required to participate. It's a troubling dynamic for all owners. Hypothetical example: Richard Childress. Childress wasn't a successful businessman with multiple revenue streams that took a liking to racing and decided to field a team. He was a racer that fielded a team and built an empire. The foundation of that empire? NASCAR. And if Childress' sponsorship reservoir were to run dry, NASCAR would bare no responsibility to help keep him afloat. So what would he be left with? A bunch of racecars. A beautiful campus. No way to make money. And then there's Bud Moore. No hypothetical, there. Moore, a NASCAR team owner from the word go, lost sponsorship in the early 1990's and couldn't find a suitable buyer. All said, he couldn't sell his inventory for 20 cents on the dollar. A lifetime in the sport and nothing to show for it. That was Doug Bawel's predicament in early December. Bawel, Jasper Motorsports' owner, had aligned with Penske Racing prior to the 2004 season to field the No. 77 Dodge with financial backing from Kodak. Just two years into a five-year contract, Kodak pulled out. The 77 shut the doors. In racing terms, Bawel was hung out of the draft. Fifteen years invested in the industry, and for what? Some cars? Some parts? A race shop? The one priceless thing he did have, the thing everyone wanted, was points. NASCAR finds a solution -- for some Rather than franchising, the Top-35 rule is NASCAR's solution to the aforementioned problem. This rule guarantees a position in the field to the top-35 ranked teams in championship owner points present at an event. And for the first five races of each new season, the rule reverts back to the top-35 teams from the previous season's final owner point standings. Bawel's No. 77 was 34th in 2005, so when the 77 shut down he had something to sell. Eight teams contacted him about a partnership, three of which, he said, were folks that wanted everything, a seamless, turn-key transition. | | | | ALSO | Michael Waltrip and Doug Bawel formed Waltrip-Jasper Racing Company, LLC. Waltrip-Jasper Racing will field the No. 55 Dodge in the 2006 Cup season.
|
|
He wasn't certain he wanted to stay in the sport. Then, during banquet week in New York, Bawel was approached by Michael Waltrip. Waltrip had just departed Dale Earnhardt Inc. to drive a second car for Bill Davis Racing, but hoped to partner with Bawel on his own Nextel Cup Series program. It was a win-win scenario: Waltrip gets a guaranteed position in the first five races, not to mention Bawel's expertise in the day-to-day operation of a Nextel Cup team. Bawel, meanwhile, maintains a vested ownership interest in a Cup team. After mulling it over for a month, Bawel accepted Waltrip's offer, and Waltrip-Jasper Racing was born. Shuffled out The moment Bawel accepted Waltrip's offer, the entire 2006 outlook changed for No. 4 team owner Larry McClure. When the No. 77 team shut down, McClure's team stood to benefit. He was 36th in the final 2005 owner point standings and stood to assume the 35th and final guaranteed spot in the field for this season's first five events. But when Bawel aligned with Waltrip, the No. 77 points were reentered into the formula, leaving McClure on the outside looking in. "I don't make the guidelines. NASCAR does that," McClure said. "I've always been a NASCAR guy, and don't like to air laundry in the open. But I think it takes some credibility away. "The guy that was listed as car owner can take points and work out a deal with someone else, and they use him to get that [points] advantage." What is fair? So the question is raised: Is it fair? The answer depends completely on one's positioning. "Without question there are people on both sides of the fence, here," Bawel said. "I've been in this deal for a long time, 15 years. What do you have to sell? I can see where Larry [McClure] is concerned, but it is what it is. It was an opportunity to keep me involved in the sport." J.D. Gibbs, president of Joe Gibbs Racing, shares a similar view on the situation. "What it does for Doug and the guys at 77 car, they invested a lot over the years in that. Well great, here's what they get back out of it," Gibbs said. "Now you can go sell that and actually make something off your investment. "So that's fair. They did a good job. It's not like they went in there and put some hokey deal together. It's a legit deal that you can show some real numbers changing hands." NASCAR president Mike Helton says the sanctioning body considers the union completely legitimate. "Sometimes circumstances just lay out the way they lay out, you know?" Helton said. "It's like seeing the potential for an opportunity, and the opportunity never gets there, and you say, 'Well, gosh, this opportunity that never got here really messed me up.' "That's not a good way to look at it. It is what it is." Like McClure, Robby Gordon missed the top-35 cut in 2005. Gordon, owner and driver of the No. 7, is expectedly opposed to the Waltrip-Jasper union. "It is what it is, but it's wrong," Gordon said. "There's two wrongs. There's wrong with Hall of Fame [Racing] putting Terry Labonte in the car. They don't deserve to be in the race any more than we deserve to be in the race. You should have to earn your way into the top 35. "Terry shouldn't be eligible for the top 35 [with] the past champion's provisional unless he's going to race the full season. Otherwise it's cherry-picking. NASCAR shouldn't let that happen. "Then the Michael Waltrip wrong. That team doesn't deserve to be in either, because they haven't paid their dues. Just like we haven't." And as far as Gordon is concerned, McClure shouldn't benefit from the absence of the No. 77 team, regardless. They didn't earn the right, he says. "It should be top 34. Don't bring McClure back down. That [77] team went away. They forfeited their eligibility," Gordon said. "But there's nothing I'm going to do about it except go out and prove that we belong. "You should have to earn your points. Welcome everybody to the track, doesn't matter who it is, but no freebies." Helton says it's always been this way and won't change anytime soon. "Over the course of the history of the sport, we've had ownership change this way," Helton explained. "Brett Bodine with Junior Johnson. Doug [Bawel] did it with Roger Penske. And Geoff Bodine did it with Alan Kulwicki. "This is nothing new. This is not out of line for NASCAR to have signed off on this. It's a business venture where Doug's involved in it, and so the unfortunate part is there is one team, in the case of the 4 car, that might have benefited if the 77 car wasn't around. "It is a business decision, and from NASCAR's perspective it is legitimate." So off they go to Daytona, Waltrip with a guaranteed spot in the Daytona 500. The value of that to the owner is not quantifiable. It enables sponsors to plan six-figure engagements knowing they're in the show. They can entertain without stress. Moving forward NASCAR isn't likely to institute a franchising infrastructure. But for owners like McClure and Gordon, it would offer solace that they wouldn't lose everything given a worst-case scenario. "I think franchising would be a good thing, at least for the top 40 teams, the people that have been here a long time," McClure said. "It'd be nice if they'd done it a long time ago, but they didn't. "We've never had big bucks to race on, but we've had success and it's been good for us. NASCAR has done a great job, and it's been good for a lot of people. "It's the greatest sport there is. I think it'd be good for any car owner that's been involved in this thing to get some kind of return for the investment, so that at the end you don't look and say what have I got? Nothing." Gordon echoes the sentiment. "That's the way to get a return on investment for the hard work teams put into it, but I don't know if NASCAR will ever do that," Gordon said. "It's just me. I'm just a team owner. "Look at some of the teams that helped NASCAR grow to what it is that are now gone. It would have helped them. At the end of the day, they're gone. I can appreciate it on the Doug Bawel side. I can appreciate there being some return on investment. "But it should be just that, return on investment. It shouldn't be a gift to somebody else." | 
© 2001-2012 NASCAR | Turner Sports Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NASCAR.COM is part of Turner Sports Digital, part of the Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital Network.
