There’s a reason for the advertisements plastered everywhere. Of course, everyone’s sick of it – fans are annoyed at the overcommercialization that drives up memorabilia costs because you have to pay for the licensing fees; drivers are sick of having to constantly watch themselves and not having the freedom to be themselves because they have to keep the sponsors happy; the teams are probably sick of having to pander around on tiptoe for the businessmen. But, it’s a practical necessity. Unlike other sports, where you can run a team on a shoestring budget, a shoestring budget in NASCAR is at least $50,000 a year – and that’s if you get charity help from someone like Dave Marcis does from Dale Earnhardt. Topline teams like Jeff Gordon’s, Dale Earnhardt’s and the Joe Gibbs setup can have outlying costs of several million (sorry, I can’t recall the exact figure). Think about it:
To operate a baseball team, you need nine guys, a field, some bats, some baseballs, uniforms of some kind, and gloves.
To operate a race team, you need a driver, a pit crew, a garage, and a car. Preferably two, in case you crash one.
Cars are expensive, folks.
NASCAR, like any sport, is as much a business as an entertainment form. The teams don’t want to be running in the red every year. The owners are rich, but they’re not LIMITLESSLY so. In order to make a profit, or just to break even (which is increasingly hard these days, which is why many of the smaller teams are going under), you need to get money from an outside source. They turn to sponsors, which is really the only thing to do. Even if you ended today’s biggest financial problem, which is the fact that the larger teams have more money and thus can afford better equipment and more cars and thus have more R&D time (due to NASCAR’s testing rules), by mandating the same equipment and minimal adjustments the way the dirt-tracking IMCA cars do, you would STILL need sponsorship, because any way you splice it cars are expensive.
Just because you, personally, do not care for NASCAR is no reason to insult others who do or to insist upon its being banned. Choice of sport is not nearly as much of a mark of character as wanton prejudice against others based on their choice of sport is. (In case that wasn’t clear – if you say all NASCAR fans are losers/rednecks/hicks/etc just because they are NASCAR fans, you’re not putting down the NASCAR fans as much as you are proving yourself to be not a nice person.) Your personal choice should be just that – your personal choice. Insisting upon forcing your personal choice upon others is an abuse of freedom by infringing on others’ rights to choose their entertainment.
And to those of you who have complained about watching NASCAR or other forms of auto racing: CHANGE THE CHANNEL.
