July 25th, 2010 
T.C. Before I really get into this post, I wanted to share a quote from Michael McDowell that he posted tonight on his Twitter page (@Mc_Driver). McDowell has been driving the #55 for Prism Motorsports this season, and is one of the start-and-park crowd’s usual suspects. There was some discussion about the reasons often given for why these teams fail to finish, which are usually bogus, and McDowell had a great response.
“They get mad at me when I tell them ‘I was going down the straight away and the funding fell off.’”
It was a bluntly honest comment from a good kid who is just trying to make it in racing, and I wanted to share. Keep fighting McD…
Over the last few seasons, starting and parking has become a regular part of the sport. Fewer teams and less available sponsorship dollars have contributed to the phenomenon. Lately though, it seems that the number of teams doing it has increased in the Nationwide and Truck Series. I believe it is a frightening trend, as most of these are victims of sponsorship losses.
Instead of trashing these teams though, I wanted to hopefully open up your eyes about the practice. While there are certainly those teams out there who are doing it for nothing but the profit, for many, this isn’t exactly the case.
Lets picture for a moment that you are a NASCAR car owner. Your team runs mid pack each week, but it’s a solid operation and it’s respectable. Then something unforeseen happens and you lose your sponsorship. Maybe you only had a partial deal, or maybe an agreement fell through. And now, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t find a replacement. What do you do? You really only have two choices: shut down completely because of lack of funding; or trim down your staff and begin starting and parking until something comes along.
This exact scenario is what many are now starting to face. Instead of putting entire shops of people out of work, owners are using the start-and-park startegy to weather the storm and keep the doors open until they can put money together. It buys the owners more time to find sponsorship, and it keeps the employees’ paychecks coming on time. Knowing that, it’s hard to really blame them for it.
Something else to consider is how this affects these owners and teams. Remember that people get involved in racing because they want to compete. They want to go out each weekend and try and be the best. Starting and parking though, goes against the very idea of competition. Pulling out of a race after only a few laps with a perfectly good race car is a very difficult thing to do. Add on top of that the fact that most fans and NASCAR itself severely disapprove of the practice, and you begin to see how demoralizing it can be.
In a perfect world, we’d have 43+ fully funded teams showing up to the track each weekend to race the full distance. But we don’t live in a perfect world. In reality, the world is a very tough place to try and race. I know for many of you, the simple mention of the phrase “start-and-park” gets your blood boiling. Trust me, I understand. It makes me sick to my stomach to watch these cars pull into the garage each weekend after a few laps.
Do me a favor though? Don’t forget that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and tough choices need to be made. Not all of the start and parkers are the enemy.
Related posts:
Posted in 
Tags: 
Taking your views into consideration, I suggest the next best thing is to cut the payout these teams receive. This practice is just disgusting. Why should the other drivers not do the same thing? Drive the whole race and not receive much more than a S&P or drop out after a few laps and receive a good day’s pay? I repeat…disgusting.
Great article. There is a huge difference between teams like PRISM that S&P for the money, and teams like Baker-Curb who do it for the reasons mentioned in the article. Jay Robinson Racing has to S&P the 49 just to be able to run 28. Its hard to vilify owners in that kind of situation.
In pari-mutual horse racing the winning$$ are divided properly depending on how large the money pool is. The more money bet, the more money paid out. There are no sponsors. The horse guys figure how much they can afford to breed and bring horse to rcae, and the busines works.
Is NASCAR fundamentally broken? Shouldnt TV and Ticket sales support the sport without Sponsors? I know currently it can not ,,,and I dont care how it happened.
What happened to the logic of what it costs to run a team? Shouldnt the economies of the busness stand up without sponor money? The problem with that model is when the loss of sponsor money leads to only 2/3 of the field really racing. Is that broken?
I am ignorant about this whole sponsorship thing combined with the ticket sales thing and the merchandising money and food and beer and parking … etc etc etc.
How is all of that money divided?
Why is it that without sponsor money aka “handouts” “subsidy” “being on the dole” NASCAR’s business model fails?
There is a pool of money out there. People are buying ticket in the stands and there is a TV revenue contract plus plus….. there is a lot of money.
Why isnt the plan…
1) We sell tickets and get TV money
2) We have that much money to pay out to you guys who race
3)You all need to figure out what you can afford to pay for a car and team and travel within that budget, without sponsors.
If it does not work, NASCAR does not work.
Sponsorship should be secondary. Sponsor money should not be what defines wether or not a team is really racing.
If NASCAR does not provide us with a REAL 43 car race…then NASCAR is cheating us, not the teams.
Shouldnt the RACING PURSE /POOL control racing?. I do not understand how it all works, but there is a lot of money going somewhere….
I said it then and I’ll say it again…double file restarts is the sponsorship down fall the of rear of the field.
Does starting and parking eventually ruin ones reputation?
Bobby Labonte seemed to think so!
I Follow McD on Twitter. I told him he was a better driver than S&P week in and week out. His response?? “Got $500,000??”
Parsons seems not to be interested in bringing his team any further than S&P status.
I feel for McDowell and I really hope he can get a good ride. Prism Motorsports whatever way I try and look at it is working a business model. And that business does not really include finding sponsorship and racing.
Agreed – not ALL are the “enemy”. But the teams that have been doing that for 3, 5 Plus years – is seriously annoying.
I think that this type of siatution should not be allowed in the Cup series at all. – If you are not fully funded, you should not be running with “The Big Dogs”.
There should also be a limit of races for the S&P, esp. the ones who have mad a career out of it. Then at least for those races they would have proper funding and FINISH the race.
It’s a weak excuse. You can run the whole race without a sponsor. Teams like Henrick have plenty of used tires available if the desire is there. If the #35 Nationwide team can do it every week with blank quarter panels, so can the rest of them. Except for Phil Parsons of course, the ultimate crook.
Great points. It is economics. And don’t forget that the sport was built around the notion that anyone could show up to race, and the fastest cars made the race. Sure, that has been tweaked over the years, but S&Ps are still allowed per the rule book.
Also note that NASCAR is doing inspections on the first car to drop out, sometimes including taking the entire car back to the NASCAR R&D center. A bit of a hassle, but doesn’t seem to have slowed down the S&Ps.
And the really bad part is that its a never ending cycle.
Because of the top 35 and past champion rules, no matter how fast your car is you could well have to go home.
Plus who is going to provide sponsorship for a car that is either going to start and park or not make the field? Nobody is my quess.
The writing is on the wall folks. In the not too distant future it will only be the big multi-car teams. Amd from then on the future is anyones guess.
Garry: All the money you refer to, i.e. ticket sales, TV money, hot dogs, parking, etc. all ends up with the tracks. The tracks pay NASCAR a sanctioning fee and NASCAR gets a cut of the TV payout. Race purses come from the race sponsors. The only form of revenue for the teams is the sponsors they can get, licensing for merchandise, and whatever side businesses they have (engine shops, chassis shops, etc.). Purse money, especially in the NNS and Truck Series, is not enough to run full races on. Most of the big teams figure their budgets without the purse money, because there is no way to guarantee performance, and thus no way to guarantee how much you’ll make from the purse. The costs to get a team to the track and buy things like tires are just too great. The model probably has some serious flaws, but it’s what we have to work with.
I have absolutely no problem with this business model. It is within the rules, and it does produce revenue for the team. Without these teams, filling a 43 car field would be very difficult. This is the “business” of racing. It is fee enterprise at its best. If NASCAR really wanted to do something about it, then cut costs, make it more appealing and less expensive to run every race to the end. But as of now, I will take the check for finishing 43rd and see everybody next week.
Ditto Stanley B. remarks and…
…if you are a team that wants to race, the whole race, then put your best qualifying foot forward and make the S&P’s just plain “P’s”.
I am in no way a fan of the top 35 lock-in. But just imagine for a minute if NASCAR did not have it? JR getting bumped out by a S&P. Seven laps into the race and 8 of 43 cars (that’s 23%) drop out w/ mysterious woes w/ JR back at the NC ranch on race day. And you thought there we a lot of empty seats at the Brickyard yesterday?
BTW: Vince Welch never did say why so many empties. Hmmmm…he just said they wouldn’t go into it right now. A rather odd thing to say!
When some team goes to all the trouble to bring a car, driver & people to a track, I expect it’s because they WANT to race. The only teams I question are those who don’t seem, year after year, to be making ANY effort to improve their situations so they can race the full event. In that regard, I think the rulebook needs to be changed. I’ve already said the payouts need to be restructured.
TC, you mentioned race purses as a source of revenue for the teams, but did not mention the series money based on final points. In Cup that overall purse is something like $33 million, a huge number. Whether or not that factors into the decisions of a S&P, I can’t say.
CC: Good point, forgot about that one…
It’s hard to believe it’s only been a few years since we had 49 fully-funded Cup teams!
I have a question that I’ve been wondering about. Let’s use this past weekend as an example. The #26 and #37, two legitimate teams, missed the race while the #66 and #55 both got in. In that situation, why wouldn’t those two teams that missed the race make a deal with the two PRISM teams…if the #66 and #55 pull out of the race and let the #26 and #37 make it instead, then those two teams could give PRISM their prize money.
It seems like everybody would win…the legitimate teams can still accumulate points and work toward the top-35, PRISM gets the money they want, and we don’t have to watch two more S&P teams in the race. Normally I wouldn’t advocate such a practice, but in this situation, I think it’s better than the alternative. And we did see Menard do something similar in the Nationwide race at Daytona under very unusual circumstances (which NASCAR really needs to address before next year).
I recommend some “statistical analysis”. Look back at years 2003/2004 when ARCA drivers were making and racing (the whole) cup races. The “cup” drivers wanted them run off, but NASCAR needed a full field. Also look back at 1995 and 1997. There were some lean years car wise also.
Then go back to the 1970′s where the stats are a little blurry and the coverage almost non existant. You will find that people have always started the race and ran until equipment failure.
Better yet, check out every cup champion from the last 20 years then review their stats in the mid 90′s. Find the one that had a host of “mechanical issues” half way through the races.
If you’ve been around the sport for 25 plus years you have seen this before. Maybe not as blatant, but it’s always been there.
I hope McD finds a quality ride. Until he does, I hope he can pay his mortgage, and utility bill and feed his family.
If NASCAR really cared about the Cup start-and-park problem, they would simply cut the size of the starting fields to 37 spots – 35 guaranteed by points and 2 knock-out qualifiers by speed. They could even lose the out-moded Past Champion’s Provisional.
But I don’t see this happening.
It is time for NASCAR (The France family) to open up economics of this business , before they kill the goose laying the golden eggs.
I AM NOT THE ONE SAYING THIS …
The Start and Parkers are making it obvious.
It is NOT the teams fault, it is NASCARs fault.
S&Ping is a sympthom of bigger problems, mainly greedy problems, and these problems might be killing the sport from the inside.
Money stays with the tracks? who owns a large percentage of the tracks?
The purpose of this thread was to point out that S&Pers have become serious issue, and it is now spreading betond the Cup and if NASCAR continues to hide its head in the sand ….. it could murder the sport.
Not long ago this was a just a good ole boy sport, not a mutlibillion business scheme. The France family deserves to be happy how they helped grow NASCAR …. but really it is a sport that kind of started on it own, it just kind of grew, and fans came to watch … BUT ……. maybe parts of it grew in a an unhealthy way. This is sometimes the case when only a few “people” control something, this is called a dictatorship.
Dictatorships usually work fine … for a while… Dictatorships can be great way to run things when something is young and starting out. Having only a few smart “people” make all the right calls without interferance can get things moving along, but after a while the original smart “people” in charge ALWAYS go away, and they ALWAYS leave some people in charge who are NOT as smart (or lucky) as the originals, but the business (country) keeps growing and it can become a monster.
BusinessInbreeding of the new “people” in charge can be unhealthy. WHEN the few people ( the new dictators) start making some bad decisions it can hurt things, but becasue the business still run as a dictatorship, problems are ignored … as long as money is being made. Then, as in all dictatorships you start having the HAVES AND HAVE NOTS …. first it is the small guy who gets crushed, but eventually it ruins the whole country (business) from the inside out. How many times has the world seen (countries) companies do this?
It is an old story. History repeats itself, and those who ignore histiorical mistakes are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
There is a lot of money being siphoned out of NASCAR. Maybe some of that money should stay in place. Maybe some money needs to be reinvested and redistributed to keep the sport healthy.
Why does something have to become so ruined and rotten before “people” finally step in and say WE NEED TO FIX THIS. Why does an oil well have to spill in the gulf for 90 days before “people” decide we should have a plan of action for this type of thing?
T.C., great piece. I don’t know much about the agendas of the various S&P teams, but if that’s how people make a living, so be it. I remember a few years back Joe Nemechek wanted to run at Talladega or Daytona rather than S&P. He got crashed out early in the race!
Garry: now you’re talking NBA-style revenue pooling, which means some sort of spending cap. Mike Daly (does Mike read this blog?) has long advocated such a cap, but I don’t see how you can control what a team spends. Who’s going to monitor paying for each bolt?
My only idea here is to shrink the championship pot and increase the payouts at each race. Give the Cup winner a nice trophy and a million bucks. Pay out the rest week by week. Now maybe some of your S&P teams can buy more equipment and not have to park.
Doug you sound a lot smarter than me,
heck I did not even have a solid idea on how to fix this, but I knew/know there was a problem …. and I KNOW there is lot of money …. I just did/do NOT exactly how to fix it, but your idea seems good to me ….. plus I am sure there are more smart people out there with good ideas.
I may be just a stupid race fan who likes to see hard racing start to finish with no planned parking and no laying down, but I am smart enough to know that when people start talking about NOT racing as a racing strategy ….. that something is wrong.
Another great insdiers thread from TNI
I am one of the few who don’t have a major issue with the S&P teams. Some of these guys would love nothing more than to race the entire event, and it probably kills them just knowing it won’t be happening. The non top 35 teams have to qualify into each event, and if they are good enough to do it, they should have the right to park it in order to survive. It is a shame that many good drivers and even pretty decent teams cannot get the necessary funds to run competitively, but that’s the world we currently live in. Truthfully, they wouldn’t do much better if the chose to try and run the entire race.
I don’t really have a problem with people like Tommy Baldwin and Joe Nemechek who apparently have to S&P from time to time in order to be able to actually compete in other races. I still think they’re racers. Phil Parsons is a horse of another color since it appears he has no intention of competing and no intention to try to find sponsors – just in the field to siphon off money from real racers. If say 20% to 30% of the prize money were to be paid out in the form of lap money that would reward real racers and make S&P’ing less attractive to people like Parsons who frequently bump real racers out of the field. Unfortunately it appears that diligent S&P’ing can be profitable enough that Parsons has moved up to Cup this year.
My post is mainly about Prism.
“This exact scenario is what many are now starting to face. Instead of putting entire shops of people out of work, owners are using the start-and-park startegy to weather the storm and keep the doors open until they can put money together. ”
According to Bill Henderson in an article from earlier this season, the 66 team only has 4 members working on the team, 5 if you include Blaney. The reason they started their team was to s&p, not “whether the storm”.
“Remember that people get involved in racing because they want to compete. ”
Phis Parsons didn’t get involved to race, he got involved to s&p.
Phis Parsons and Prism is a disgrace to the sport. Bill Henderson said it costs $60,000 to go out to California earlier this season. Both cars making the race at Indy got them a cool $268,000. $268,000-$120,000= $148,000. I think they could afford to run the full race with at least one car with that kind of money left over.
Funny how Mcdowell deleted the posts from his facebook account. Guess he didn’t like the fact that the Prism teams made ~$150 k for running 39 laps.
Justin – TC’s post was about teams like RAB, Tommy Baldwin and Baker Curb, not Prism (it’s no secret what Randy Humphrey and Phil Parsons are in the sport to do). It just happened that the quote that gave him the idea came from McDowell who’s driving for Prism.
I personally would rather have short fields than this start and park crap. Not only does this practice take money from other teams it can also impact the championship. Example, Texas last year when JJ crashed early. It’s a lot easier to make up points when 5 cars in the field have no intention of running the whole race. If this is going to be a trend for the foreseeable future the way drivers points are rewarded needs to be changed. No drivers points to the back of the field. Give them owners points, since they probably care most about the top 35, but don’t let them take points that could be given to race winners. I say cut the points off at the top 25 with more points front load top-10 and up.
GREAT idea Craig…. If it is true (as said above ) that most teams have their budget set without ever considering thier perfromance on the track during the season ( uising free sponsor handout money …. being on the dole ….. not needing to win) then lets at least make the races more exciting …. how about … NO ONE PAST 25th place gets ANYTHING ( are you listerning lil cybaby janey montoya? 32nd place mean you get NOTHING!!! no laying down )
If no one gets anything past 25th spot … it will eliminate these S&Pers and we will see drivers AGAIN racing to race … not to make a living ….. THIS IS RACING, not mail room duty.
For that matter only drivers in the Top 10 should get 80% of the points. In the old days it was WIN1st, PLACE2nd AND SHOW3rd … and the rest of those LOSERS GOT NOTHING.
BE A WINNER OR GO AWAY. If you cant stand the heat get out of the kitchen. If you cant win then get a real job and post to blogs from home, like most of us do >: ( …. You better understand that it is an honor and privilege to be in the show. You are lucky to be able to race every weekend … ACT LIKE IT!!!! PUT UP OR GO HOME
If you want to just make a living … then get a real job, go sort mail or be a mechanic or something ……..
BUT….
IF you want to be a BADAZZ RACING CAR HERO THEN GET OUT THERE AND RACE THE FULL RACE AND GO FOR THE WIN, DONT PARK as a race strategy. (Example -although he is not one my favorite drivers, I credit Jimmy Johnson for being BADAZZ RACING CAR HERO …I wish there more like him)
ARE YOU LISTENING NASCAR …
THIS IS GETTING BORING !!!!!!