Chairman and CEO: Meeting 'gives everybody a really good seat at the table'
RELATED: Drivers react to formation of drivers' council
LONG POND, Pa. -- NASCAR Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Brian France opened up about the recent formation of a drivers' council, saying Sunday that last weekend's meeting gave an already fluid communications process a more formal setting.
France spoke after attending Sunday morning's pre-race drivers' meeting at Pocono Raceway ahead of Sunday's Axalta 'We Paint Winners' 400 (1 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1, MRN, SiriusXM). He and his wife, Amy, were at the track to promote their charitable work with the Gabrielle's Angel Foundation.
Drivers who attended last weekend's summit with NASCAR officials near Dover International Speedway were overwhelmingly positive about the discussion, and the ideas that emerged from it. For France, the meeting was a continuation of an already open line of communication.
"We've said from the beginning that we're going to improve our communications across the board with all the stakeholders, and they're certainly as important as anybody, so that's consistent," France said. "What you're seeing is just more formalized conversations. We talk all the time about things that are important to them... we did the same thing with the track operators. We didn't have a formal get-together with them; we now do in February of every year where it's very formal and we lay out things for them.
"That just gives everybody a really good seat at the table to express what's important to them, and that's what I've said from the beginning that it's important to us."
The formation of a drivers' council almost has a parallel group in the Race Team Alliance, which formed last July and grew to include the majority of NASCAR teams last August. When asked whether similar talks would happen with the RTA, France indicated he was open to the idea.
"When anybody has things that can improve the sport, we're going to be open to that," France said. "It doesn't really matter how the exact form of communications happens. What matters is, it does happen and we're getting the stakeholders as close to us as we can because there's a lot of good ideas that come out of these discussions -- the drivers with safety, there's a business side to this that they have an interest in. There's all kinds of things that they have an interest in that we need to make sure we communicate well with them."
When presented with the notion that having wide-open, cooperative talks about racing issues represented a major shift to a new-look NASCAR, France demurred.
"Not at all," France said. "It's exactly what I said a number of years ago that that's my style is to be collaborative, to do more communications, not less. And if we have to formalize them to get more input, then we'll formalize them. Whatever it takes to get everybody to be able to express what's important to them."