Can Juan Pablo Montoya Pump up NASCAR’s TV Ratings?
By Mike Mulhern
DOVER, Del.
It’s the NFL part of the NASCAR television season, the toughest part of the TV game for stock car racing, as newcomer ABC is painfully learning.
Brian France’s 10-race championship ‘chase,’ this 10-week stretch of playoffs, was created in 2004 to enliven this part of the Nextel Cup tour, by resetting the standings for the sport’s top teams over the first 26 events. But while the chase may add intrigue for those who follow the sport closely, it hasn’t done much to boost TV ratings among the broader audience, possibly because the first two chase races are at relatively little-known tracks off the beaten path.
Maybe Juan Pablo Montoya making the front row here yesterday for Sunday’s 400-miler can perk up casual viewers. Tour points leader Jimmie Johnson edged Montoya for the Dodge 400 pole at 154.765 mph. But NASCAR needs more than just its core audience to snap out of the ratings doldrums that have plagued the sport the last year or so.
Final ratings are in for Sunday’s NASCAR championship opener at Loudon, N.H., and ABC reports the national rating was 3.3, with 5.1 million viewers in 3.7 million households. The national ratings include all markets across the country, not just the big cities that make up the ‘overnights,’ where NASCAR’s Loudon race drew only a 2.8 rating.
ABC’s 3.3 would be an eight percent increase in viewers over last year’s Loudon race, which was carried on TNT-cable. ABC also reports a two percent increase in males 18-34, a nine percent increase in males 18-49, and an eight percent increase in males 25-54.
However in 2005 TNT-cable pulled a 4.2 for that Loudon race.
And the top-rated sports events the last two weeks, not surprisingly, were NBC’s Sunday night NFL games: an 11.6 rating (13 million viewers) Sept. 9th and a 9.8 rating (11.1 million) Sept. 16th.
ABC kicked off its stretch of the NASCAR season, the last 11 races, with a 4.2 rating of the Richmond race Saturday night Sept. 8, with 4.7 million viewers. That was the 13th-ranked sports program of that weekend.
So it may be time for NASCAR executives and ABC officials to take a deeper look at the markets in the chase. For example, might extending the playoffs to 12 races perk things up? That would make the Labor Day 500 at Los Angeles’ California Speedway the kickoff event for the chase, and it would make the typically dizzying Bristol night-time 500 the cutoff race.
In a twist, perhaps to shake things up, Brad Daugherty, the former NBA All-star and part-time NASCAR Busch and Truck team owner, will be getting some tryouts as a booth analyst for ESPN’s Busch coverage the next two weeks, while analysts Rusty Wallace and Andy Petree take turns sitting in the production truck looking at race coverage from a different vantage point.
How NASCAR’s international TV package may be faring isn’t clear, but things should be picking up, with Jacques Villeneuve planning to join former Montoya in this sport, beginning with tonight’s Truck race at Las Vegas.
And Villeneuve isn’t the only Formula One driver planning a switch to NASCAR. Now Scott Speed, the once-promising F1 driver for Team Red Bull, is now set to make a stock car debut for Toyota at Talladega in two weeks in an ARCA race, the same race in which Villeneuve is entered.
Speed, 24, was dropped by the F1 team earlier this year, but Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz wants to keep the Californian in his sports’ fold, so he’s pushing him into NASCAR. The Talladega race will be a test of how Speed might take to this series. Speed will be running under the guidance of NASCAR’s Red Bull arm.
Meanwhile for Kyle Busch everything seems to be coming up roses, and now it looks like Mars, one of the largest privately-owned companies in the U.S., will be moving from Robert Yates’ Ford team to Joe Gibbs’ soon-to-be Toyota team as sponsor for the 22-year-old Busch next season.
But that’s a serious blow for Yates, who has carried Mars’ sponsorship for several years, and who now finds himself without any major sponsorship for his two-car Ford team for 2008, and with only one driver signed. Facing those headaches, Yates a few weeks ago decided to turn the entire NASCAR operation over to his son Doug, who is banking on major support from fellow Ford man Jack Roush.
“I decided it’s time for me to go find something fun to do, that I could do well, and pass the torch to Doug,” Yates said yesterday in his first appearance at a track since the move. “I just decided I’d had enough, and I just want to try to enjoy a few years of my life.
“The kids do so much better when it’s their decisions, when they have to tough through it. It’s hard to pass the wisdom. It’s hard to pass on anything to your kids.
“But Doug is pretty close on my heels in building this the last 20 years. He’s not like a silver-spoon kid. He’s learning, he’s challenged, he wants to do this.
“I was like ‘My goodness, I love what I do. I’ll never retire.’ And if I didn’t love what I was doing, I’d quit and go do something I could do.
“I’ve given up this job because I can’t operate at the level I was used to all those years.
“I don’t want to go away mad. I could get a little bitter about it, but you know what – It is the way it is.
“The way you do business now is certainly not the way I did business…and I just don’t need to re-train myself.
“Life is good, my life is good. Carolyn (his wife) has waited 40 years on me to spend time with her. If she doesn’t fire me from retirement right away, I’m going to do things I enjoy…though I’m not sure what that’s going to be.
“I don’t think people realize I never got into this sport to be an owner. It just fell on me. I worked as an engine builder, and I do not care about ever being anybody’s boss.
“As a car owner you have think too much about the budgets and all that. I’m going to find something that I can excel at and enjoy. That may be building engines, that may be helping Doug. But I want out of the ownership position.
“And the best way to give it to Doug is let him earn it.”
The decline of the Yates team over the past few years, since the 1999 championship, has been painful to watch. So his announcement in late July of a merger with Paul Newman and Carl Haas was intriguing. But two weeks ago Doug Yates pulled the plug and took the team into the Jack Roush camp.
Robert Yates says Newman and Haas “came to see me, and said they wanted to do this deal. I was ‘Okay.’
“They were going to handle all the sponsorship relationships and all the engineering. But there was never even the signing of a name, because I’ve lived 40 years in this business shaking your hand or either whipping your butt or getting whupped. That’s the way we did.
“Now it’s all about how thick is the contract and how many attorneys can be involved.
“I didn’t think I could do the job they expected. And I didn’t want to fail. So it was the perfect time for me to do this.
“It’s just better for Doug to do his own deal. He’s learned a lot on the job…but it’s his job now.”
Robert Yates says Doug’s way of doing business will be “way different.
“He’s extremely firm with people. He gets some of that from his mom. I’m about as wimpy as you get, and she’s about as firm as you get.
“Doug has picked up some of my traits to be fair with people, but it’s very clear when he talks to you you get the message.
“Ernie Irvan said I could talk for 30 minutes and not say a thing. Doug Yates is just the opposite.”
And looking back on his legendary career: “I thought winning the Daytona 500 in 1969 as an engine builder (for LeeRoy Yarbrough and car owner Junior Johnson) was the highlight of my life. But there’s just a lot of those. And you can’t get but 10 feet tall. I’ve been 10 feet tall a lot of times.
“If I had to put anything on a tombstone it would be ‘He wasn’t a good engine builder…he was just fair: He was fair with people.’”
THE NASCAR NOTEBOOK
Jimmie Johnson says it’s nice to start from the pole Sunday afternoon but it’s more important “to get that first pit stall.”
This is not only one of the most dangerous pit roads on the stock car tour, because it’s so narrow, but it’s also one of the most difficult for drivers to navigate.
Car owner Bill Davis was shut out of the field here this weekend when both Dave Blaney and Jeremy Mayfield failed to qualify. Also missing the cut: Ward Burton, Scott Wimmer, Sam Hornish Jr. and Kevin Lepage.
And Loudon winner Clint Bowyer was surprisingly far off the pace in qualifying and will start at the end of the field. Teammate Jeff Burton didn’t fare much better. But they’ll have good company back there, with Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon.
For Bowyer, adding insult to injury – he’ll have to share a pit stall Sunday, with Michael Waltrip.
Joey Logano “is the future of Joe Gibbs Racing, the guy we’ll all be chasing in the next three years, even though he’s only 17 right now,” according to teammate Denny Hamlin, who says “they’re throwing me out of the Busch car next year to put Joey in it.”
Logano is the guy that Mark Martin picked as a future NASCAR star some five years ago, wound up in the Gibbs camp – soon to be a Toyota operation – when Ford’s Jack Roush was slow to get him signed. And Logano captured the NASCAR Busch East championship here yesterday.
Rain marred last week’s Daytona 500 tire testing, so Clint Bowyer, one of the men trying to get those laps in, figures another testing is on tap soon: “It was a monsoon down there. We tried to get it in. Goodyear did everything they could, certainly the track did everything possible. It just wasn’t going to happen. It sounds like we’re going to have to go back.”
With suspicions about some teams using special ‘trick’ shock setups on the stock car tour lately at car-of-tomorrow events, the specter of a NASCAR crackdown catching a championship contender and slapping down a 100-point fine has been suddenly heightened.
Jimmie Johnson, whose team has been through the penalty wringer more than once, says a hefty penalty like that, at this point of the season, could be devastating: “To recover from it would be tough, there’s no doubt about it. As somebody that’s been nailed on things, all we ask for is consistency.
“There are some big questions with the body on the car-of-tomorrow and the ‘gold’ template versus the templates that fit. We got nailed in Sonoma; all the templates fit, but a gold template—that’s a scanned computer image—didn’t look right.
“So we hope the sanctioning body is as consistent as possible and if you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
“We’re well inside that box now. We’ve been known to push the envelope, but the message has been made crystal clear to Hendrick Motorsports, and I think to the entire garage, that you don’t mess with the car-of-tomorrow.
“We could potentially be ‘soft’ in some areas and leaving something on the table, but we can’t afford to be lose 100 points or lose a crew chief in the chase.”
A midnight shooting at the Delaware State University campus across the street from this track left two students injured, one seriously, and the campus was ‘locked down’ during a search for the gunman.
Track officials called the incident “isolated and poses no threat to patrons or activities at Dover International Speedway.”