Noted owners in 2009 help put race issue in rear view

One look at the entry lists for the season-opening weekend at Daytona and from a diversity standpoint, one would think 2009 is just like any other year in NASCAR. Once again there will be no black drivers in the Sprint Cup Series.

Chase Austin and Marc Davis hope to get into races in the Camping World Truck Series and Nationwide Series, respectively, but both drivers will be racing on a part-time basis.

Bill Kimm

It would be easy to criticize the sport for a lack of diversity, but that would be misguided. In fact, NASCAR is among the leaders in diversity -- you just have to look outside of the car and toward the owners' boxes.

Brad Daugherty is a full-time owner in the Cup Series with JTG Daugherty Racing; Art Shelton and his Trail Motorsport team will debut this season in both the Truck and Nationwide series; and Randy Moss begins his first full season in the Truck Series after debuting his Randy Moss Motorsports team last year.

This is a major accomplishment for NASCAR, especially when compared to other major American sports leagues which trumpet themselves on being diverse.

The National Football League has rules on interviewing minority coaches before a job offer can be made, but of the 32 teams in the league not one is owned by a black person. The same can be said of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball.

Now to be fair, owning an NFL or MLB franchise is much more difficult than it is in NASCAR, a sanctioning body for which the teams serve as independent contractors. The number of teams in the three national series is triple that of the NFL or MLB. On any given weekend in NASCAR, there are about 70-80 teams spread across the three series looking to make the field.

But that simple fact alone shouldn't lessen the due credit.

NASCAR has been around for 60 years and has always had the reputation of being white and Southern. So for three teams to be minority-owned is a boon to a sport looking to shed that bias and reflect a more diverse image.

Randy Moss

For their part, however, Daugherty, Shelton and Moss would prefer to be perceived as owners and nothing more or less.

When Shelton announced that Austin would drive his truck the obvious questions came up regarding the all-black owner-driver relationship. Yet Shelton quickly nipped all that minority talk in the bud.

"Trail Motorsport will race as a team that happens to be minority," Shelton said. "We're going to race as a team that's going to be competitive and happens to be minority. If you want to label that as diversity, yes. But we diversify only for the point of being successful. That's the only standard."

In 2009, the hope here is that Shelton's conviction will be the consensus among all of us. Yes, there still will be the Drive for Diversity program; the media will focus on Austin and Davis for being black; and NASCAR will be scrutinized for not having a minority driver in the Cup Series.

But during a time when America just elected its first black president, maybe the focus can finally shift from the color of skin to the person underneath.

Shelton says his is a race team that happens to be minority. Hopefully, in the near future, the need to qualify that statement with the latter will be eliminated.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.

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