Thinking Outside the Box
By Walt Newcomb
THE END IS NEAR
Monday, July 9, 2007
There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the decline of auto racing at the local level. There are a number of things that have contributed to this, the most oft mentioned reason seems to be that NASCAR has been running so many of their races at night in direct competition with those local tracks. That’s not helping the issue but I don’t think it is the root of the problem.
Back over four years ago, I wrote an article for StockCarCity.com called Dial 1-800 Get Me the Stuff. Back then I gave a hint of this issue in my distain for local racers using “Towter-homes” and then “Winston Cup style transporters”. I believe this is something that has lead to the decline in attendance at racing’s grassroots. Okay, I can see some of you squinting your eyes like the caveman in the insurance commercial and you’re probably asking, “What?”
These days, when one visits a local track, if they look into the pit area, they’ll see a bunch of enclosed trailers. Enclosed trailers have made things convenient for racers. They’re easy to load up. They provide place to secure all of the team’s valuables and offer shelter in the event of inclement weather.
It wasn’t that long ago that the preeminent NASCAR, then Grand National team, towed a single car to each race on an open trailer with a tire rack and toolbox behind a cube van. Back then, when a racecar was transported down the road, everyone knew that it was a racecar. These days, most of the trailers that local racers use are the equivalent of a plain white box. They are clean, pristine, benign and but for a few, totally unidentifiable.
Some might have some fancy graphics including a picture of a racecar. Those are few and far-between. Most of these trailers don’t even have decals that indicate any relation to racing. A racecar that could raise the interest of some young lad or lass is hidden within. And that is the key.
I thought about that a lot last weekend. We traveled to NHIS in Loudon, New Hampshire with Ed Partridge. Ed has an International MXT pickup truck. This thing turns heads, mostly because people have never seen anything like it. It is huge, decked out in chrome and comes from the factory with forty inch tall tires.
You know I remember when kids used to press their faces against the glass on their parents cars. We’d be passing them with our Modified on an old plank-body truck. I remember reading their lips; “Look at those tires!” “It’s a racecar!” “Wow, that’s so cool!” Whenever we stopped at a gas station or a rest area there would usually be a few cars that would just follow us in. Eventually there would be some kid who would ask, “Where can I watch that car race?”
It’s funny but the reason that I wound up working on that racecar was because Chris Young used to live nearby and I’d often see him driving that ramp truck with the Modified on it to the track. I didn’t know Chris. It turned out he lived less than a mile from where do.
If he was driving the rig he has today, I probably couldn’t differentiate it from a landscaper or a moving truck. Thus, had I been working on a car in a lower class at Riverhead Raceway for a friend who decided to call it quits a few races into the season now, perhaps I’d just stay home instead of trying to get hooked up with a neighbor.
Twenty years ago, when the regional racers of that time traveled, most of them did it in similar fashion to the way we did or towed an open trailer behind a pickup or van. Most local tracks don’t have secured facilities. When the day of racing was over, most of the time, teams took their haulers or trailers home or to a hotel. Teams could often be found working on their racers in a parking lot and that would draw a lot of attention too.
I’ve been told that the hotel parking lots along A1A in the Daytona area were literally packed with racecars during Speedweeks. I can envision the conversations. “Wow, that thing looks fast!” The response might have been, “You can see how fast it is at New Smyrna Speedway tonight. It’s only about twenty minutes from here.”
Enclosed trailers are not evil. They are however the most commonly used vehicle to transport racecars. Teams build small shops in them. Some are air-conditioned and others are equipped with lounges. It’s a great way to move a bunch of stuff.
Unfortunately these trailers makes racing impersonal. Once the racecar is loaded up, it’s just a trailer. That’s not the way it used to be.
I remember putting a bunch of local kids behind the wheel of our racecar after it was loaded on our ramp truck. I’d tell the kid to make their parents bring a camera next week so we could take a picture. That turned into numerous sponsorship opportunities for us.
If we had just taken a Polaroid picture of the kid and given it to them, it would have been a nice gesture. But by telling them to get their folks to bring a camera to the next show they had to come back. It worked like magic.
Many of these kid’s parents became our sponsors. They’d bug their mom and dad about it all week long. It never seemed to fail. They’d be back even if the parents had to cancel something out of their schedule.
Somehow the view of the heavens from the seat of that car inspired a number of those kids. Several of them race Modifieds today. It’s kind of tough to put a kid in a racecar that’s on the upper deck of your rolling racecar shop and it just doesn’t inspire the same results.
When I was young we had three or four television stations, bicycles, some sticks and balls. We were lucky. We had a drive-in movie theatre and a couple of bowling alleys. There was also a racetrack.
Young folks have so many more options for entertainment today. There are computer games, video games, skateboard parks, shopping malls, paintball fields and toys the likes of which grown men buy them for themselves. Racing is entertainment and the battlefield for that marketplace is riddled with laser tag sites, arcade rooms, roller rinks, video and comic book stores and other businesses that have failed to enchant today’s youths.
I believe the biggest reason that attendance at many local stock car racing venues has begun to wane is because local racers and promoters fail to reach that same demographic. The crowd I see at racetracks continues to age and the youthful exuberance and wonderment has been reduced to a relatively low level. Without recognizing the importance of promoting the sport to today’s youth, local racing will continue to fade away.
These vanilla boxes aren’t going away anytime soon. To solve the exposure problem, promoters will have to think outside of the box like this to keep local racing alive. They’re going to have to work with teams and their local school districts to bring the cars to the kids. This would be show and tell of a different kind. But it might just work.
That’s how I see it. Opinions vary.
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