Fitz looking for changes in Nationwide Series' future

Armando Fitz has a great thing going in what is now known as the Nationwide Series.

A Nationwide Series car, a two-car East Series team and a four-car team in NASCAR Mexico is a lot to handle, and it's becoming a bona fide pipeline for Hispanic drivers of note to get their feet wet in NASCAR and developing a solid core of drivers here in the States.

What he doesn't have is peace of mind.

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He's got a solid single-car Nationwide team, but he's lining up every weekend against Sprint Cup-quality opposition, and that's a game of dollars that he can't hope to compete in.

Sponsors SuperCuts and Family Dollar are good, solid, dependable Nationwide Series backers who love the sport and have fun with it. But they don't print money like Cup sponsors do, and that's the crux of Fitz's argument.

"It's very tough," said Fitz, whose father-in-law is Cup team co-owner Felix Sabates. "I probably spend a third of what the [Cup teams] do. I can't afford to dedicate the engineering support and the resources that these guys have. We've gotten some help on the manufacturer side from Dodge, and nothing against them, but they put their resources into the Cup side. It's just hard."

Specifically, it's not the satellite Nationwide Series the Cup teams have that irks Fitz; it's racing against the Cup drivers.

Coming off a second-place finish by Mike Bliss at Memphis, Bliss was taken out by a Cup driver in the next race -- on the fourth lap.

"We got taken out by a Cup guy," Fitz fumed. "They're racing for wins and the cash. I'm sitting there in a dog fight to try to finish as close as I can to fifth in the championship, because that's as high as I realistically could get, and we got taken out by a Cup guy and that pretty much ended that.

"It's hard on my guys. We were just coming off a second-place finish ... to get taken out at Lap 4 because of a little bit of impatience..."

Consider what Fitz has done since he purchased his father-in-law's Busch Series operation at the end of the 2000 season. He signed SuperCuts, one of the nation's leading franchised hair salons, as a sponsor for the 2002 season and has steadily built that team into a series stalwart.

"I couldn't ask for a better sponsor than SuperCuts," Fitz said. "When we finished second at Memphis earlier this year, that was their second runner-up finish since they came on board. They love the sport and have been just great partners in this.

"SuperCuts has been incredible, it's a great place for them. Family Dollar has been with us for a couple years on a limited basis and we're trying to get them to grow their support."

So when he talks about being at a disadvantage to the larger, better-funded Cup teams, you need to take him at his word.

"For the individual Busch teams -- us, Brewco, Braun, CJM, there's a few of us still left -- It'll be difficult, but what are you going to do? The only other option is to go ahead and get out."

In the meantime, he began looking at the growing Hispanic market and saw potential with the NASCAR Mexico series.

"In 2005, we had three Busch programs and it was too much," Fitz said. "When I scaled back in 2006 to just the one team, I lost a Busch program with Carlos Contreras. I'm Hispanic, I strongly believe there's a tremendous amount of talent out there, and if they're given an opportunity, we could get some new drivers in the series."

It's going to be problematic in the next few years, Fitz said.

"In the next three years, I think you're going to see a lot of big-name Cup drivers retiring, like Michael Waltrip, Kyle Petty and some others," he said. "[Tony] Stewart and [Jeff] Gordon aren't going to run until they're 47 or 48 like the old-school guys did. You need more than one Martin Truex Jr. and one Kyle Busch moving into the series a year."

Fitz Motorsports

Armando Fitz

That gap can't be plugged with open-wheel drivers, either.

"[Juan] Montoya isn't going to be happy running 20th for the next five years," Fitz opined. "These guys are used to running a lighter schedule, 16 or 17 races, and now it's 36, 38, plus testing and all. And, a lot of drivers have gotten thrown into it when they weren't ready. These are talented kids, but they're not giving them the time they need to develop, and it's not on the track, it's the overall maturity."

Enter the diversity program he and Contreras started in NASCAR Mexico, with driver Ruben Pardo, and you start to see where Fitz is coming from.

"Carlos and I started the team down there with Ruben Pardo as the driver, and I started a Busch East team for him up here to start the whole development project," Fitz said. "It was a lot easier to field the Busch East team than a full Busch effort. It's $500,000 versus $5 million. I could spend $1 million total, half here and half there, and still get a big bang for the buck and give a sponsor a nice return at the same time, develop a driver and a crew chief and some crew guys for a tenth of the cost.

"I only planned on running Ruben in three races up here, but he did so well we just decided to run him the whole season. He won a race, won rookie of the year and became the first minority driver to win any kind of title in NASCAR's top series.

"We said, 'This can work.' We added a second team in Mexico, kept our Busch East team and we just announced we have expanded to four teams in Mexico for '08. I can offer a sponsor that reach across the border, if they're interested in reaching the Hispanic market, whereas the Cup guys might give them a much smaller spot on the Cup car."

So now, come full circle, the problem of the "Buschwhackers" is still the elephant in the room. There has been much talk of late about what to do with the current situation, including not awarding the Cup drivers Nationwide points but allowing them to race for the money and the track time, as well as putting a cap on the number of drivers allowed in the Nationwide events.

Fitz supports any kind of change if it served to let the Nationwide Series develop its own identity.

"I definitely think it's necessary and I would support it," Fitz declared. "Kevin Harvick is third in points and he's run 22 or 24 of 33 races. Here's what NASCAR has to decide. What is the Nationwide Series? They have to decide what its purpose is. Is it to develop drivers and crew chiefs and pit crew guys? Are we going to have our own identity or are we just going to be a mini Cup Series?

"If you go back and look at Carl Edwards and Harvick and Burton ... these guys win every week. Harvick has won six races, and that's great, but I think you need some new blood and we need to put a limit on moving into Cup. You can't move into Cup before you're 21, 22 years old. Let them come into the Nationwide Series when they're 18 and let them develop.

"I don't mind racing RCR's Busch teams; I mind racing Harvick and Burton. This sport is the only major professional sport where the professional athlete can step down. [Former team partner] Terry Bradshaw was very vocal about this, and that's one of the reasons he got out. He said NASCAR doesn't care about the Busch Series. He used this analogy: 'the way this is set up, I could play on Sunday in Pittsburgh [in the NFL] and next Saturday go back and play [college football] at Louisiana Tech?'

Here's Fitz's proposal. If you look at it from the perspective of the privateer teams, it makes sense, and it even makes sense if you look at it from a track promoter's standpoint.

"If you have 20 Cup guys in the race, don't let them have a guaranteed starting spot," Fitz began. "They should be racing for those last 13 spots, not Eric McClure, not Kyle Krisiloff ... not the guys who have been there all year long. If you have 15 Nationwide guys against 20 Cup guys, that's not going to make a difference, but Jeff Burton should have to be out-qualifying Harvick and David Ragan and Edwards. He shouldn't have to be out-qualifying Eric McClure and Kyle Krisiloff. If you have 13 Cup guys in the race, do you think that's going to make a difference in the attendance?

"If they get the points, I do think it is an issue when you have Harvick third in points when he's only running 24 races. That person should have to earn his way in. He should be out-qualifying his peers, not the guys who have been there all year."

Another problem is pit crews. Fitz's team is very good for a Nationwide Series team, but they come up a little short against the hired air guns of the Cup/Nationwide teams.

"I can't afford to pay top Cup guys to pit my car," Fitz said. "When we come into the pits, our guys will crank off 16-second stops all day long, which are good for the Nationwide Series, but they're going against 13-second guys."

In 2009, the Nationwide Series will switch to the Car of Tomorrow, which is another cost to the stand-alone series teams.

"Cup teams already have a year and a half with them, and they'll be fine. All they're going to do is, their first-generation chassis that they ran this year, those will slide down to the Busch program and they'll build new stuff for the Cup teams.

"We have to start building a couple of cars for '09 right now," Fitz said. "If we don't..."

Fitz Motorsports finished 11th in owner points this year, the final year of the Busch sponsorship, and nine of the 10 teams that finished ahead of him were owned by Cup team owners or drivers.

While there's joy over a solid season at Fitz Motorsports, there's also an abundance of uncertainty, and absolutely no piece of mind.