Month: July 2007

A telecommunications company pays a lot of money to be a sponsor. That company is then bought out by another company. The new company wants to change the name on the sponsorship to the new name.

That sounds a lot like the Cingular/AT&T deal, except it’s not. An announcement is expected tomorrow (7/7/07) that NASCAR’s Nextel Cup Series will be renamed to the Sprint Cup Series (or something like that).

So, it’s ok for NASCAR to have a sponsor that gets bought out and changes its name, but not for a car owner? NASCAR needs to stop competing with its car owners for sponsorship dollars.

Suspension update: In a post titled “That’ll Teach ’em, NASCAR” I talked about suspended crew chiefs still being at the track. NASCAR has just announced that they are no longer allowing suspended crew members at the track. As I said before, “Hello? The series sponsor is a cell phone company! They don’t have cell phones in the pits? Come on.” If NASCAR finds out that a suspended crew chief is still in contact with his team on race day via cell phone, what are they going to do? Maybe they are starting to get tough with the rules. It’s going to take a lot to convince me, but they’re on the right track.

At the Sears Point race, NASCAR suspended a couple of Hendrick Motorsports crew chiefs for 6 races. So at last weekend’s race at New Hampshire, how did Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson perform?

Gordon qualified 8th and finished 2nd.  Johnson was worse off: he qualified 10th and finished 5th.

Those penalties sure did have an effect on the teams, didn’t they? And if I heard right on the little bit of pre-race coverage I watched, at least one of the suspended crew chiefs was actually at the track. NASCAR says they are only prohibited from areas where you need a NASCAR hard card, plus they can’t talk on the team’s radio. Hello? The series sponsor is a cell phone company! They don’t have cell phones in the pits? Come on.

Suspension should be suspension. They’ve escorted other suspended individuals off track property before, so I’m not sure why it’s ok for a suspended crew chief to hang out in the team’s motor coach.

Now NASCAR is making noises that they may start suspending other team members as well if the cheating doesn’t stop.  It’s really simple for NASCAR to get a team’s attention: all they have to do is suspend the owner, the driver, and the car for the weekend of the race that they’re caught cheating in. Doesn’t need to be a multi-week suspension (unless the team is really dense about getting the message; one could argue that the #48 team meets that criteria). How many missed races would it take before the sponsor wants some of their money back? That’d beat a measly $100,000 fine anytime.