NASCAR’s Attempt To Attract Casual Fans Is Costing Them

NASCAR has spent two decades trying to attract the casual fan, but have they permanently damaged their primary base in the process?

I wake up Saturday morning to find out here and everywhere about Tony Stewart confronting a fan at the Chili Bowl. All these stories come around to the same point, does it hurt the sport? The national sports media will say its a black eye having one of its top stars confronting a fan, that racers taking each other out on the track is an embarrassment to the sport. Yet when the Bengals and Steelers play the confrontations are just intensity and drive for the sport.

When NASCAR went through its explosive growth of the 90’s and early this century it was driven with large personality drivers and action on the track. Those things drove the excitement of its core fans, which helped attract a whole new audience to NASCAR races. The sport was on fire, a new network, FOX, had transformational coverage and spurred on the new fans with advertising during the almighty NFL season.

Then somewhere in the NASCAR offices a decision was made to cater to the new fans to keep them, the base will always be there. In what we have found in the last decade is that decision has caused the television ratings to crater and the popularity with not just the casual fan but its base supporters to dissipate. The problem with counting on the base is that it was young. Most NASCAR experts will tell you the sport started nationally in 1979 with the first live Daytona 500, and the famous fight in the infield. All the stick and ball sports built their bases decades if not a century ago and have been passed on from generation to generation.

The decisions to reign in the emotions of the drivers as to not turn off the new fan irritated the longtime fan. Then the relocation of the races from small tracks that was the gasoline to the flame of the emotion, was replaced by larger less incident prone tracks. You add in the greater dependence of larger corporate sponsors and you get what was the vanilla NASCAR, that we the fans are struggling with today.

Inarguably MMA is the fastest growing sport in this country over the last 10-15 years. The raw emotion shown by the cage fighters draws people like a moth to the flame. And Dana White (president of UFC) instead of trying to reduce the outlandish actions to cater to the fringe fans, has promoted the rawness of its stars. And in turn those fringe fans keep adding to the base and they can charge $75 for each of their PPV events.

I am not talking about fistfights between drivers on the track, but there is a reason the tracks themselves promote the conflict, it drives ticket sales. In the same way the networks promote the races, the attitude and emotion drove the sport to new heights. Dale Sr., Darrell Waltrip, Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin, Geoffrey Bodine and Tim Richmond drew the camera to them with what they said and how they acted. Fans loved it, media reported on it and new eyes came to NASCAR.

More racing: Darrell Waltrip Part Of The Issue For NASCAR

NASCAR needs to bring back the excitement and emotions from their drivers, that is what the brings the base fans. Then they spread the word about how exciting it was. “Second Sucks” gets people to watch next week, “I am happy with a top 10” does not.