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Five questions with: NASCAR CEO Brian France
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Brian France runs the most powerful stock car racing sanctioning body in the world, taking over the position of CEO and chairman of NASCAR from his father in 2003. During his tenure, he oversaw the start of the Chase for the NEXTEL Cup in 2004, negotiated new television deals with several networks in 1999 and 2005 and was instrumental in the debut of NASCAR’s next generation racecar. The Sporting News named him one of the five most powerful sports executives in 2005.
Prior to his current position, France was the co-founder of the Craftsman Truck Series in 1995 and managed NASCAR's marketing department and touring divisions along with several short tracks, including Tucson Raceway Park in Arizona.
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BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, I'd love for all 11 drivers to be within 25 points of each other, myself. I know but the reality of it is, that's sports. You're going to have World Series that are not as exciting as others, and super bowls, and that's just the nature of a dominant performance, quite frankly, by Jimmie Johnson. If he weren't so dominant, we might have a different discussion.
So you have to give him and his team to come back and win in Phoenix, when they were down on their luck, to stumble through the races and came right out and won. That's dominance. When that happens, they separate themselves pretty well from the rest of the field.
What do you think about ABC moving the final 34 minutes of the race last Sunday to ESPN2, and if there's anything that you can do about that in the future?
BRIAN FRANCE: Well, we didn't like it. That was not what we had anticipated. But we have talked to them repeatedly in the last couple of days, and have, you know, there were lots of circumstances that they had to consider. I don't have to agree with each one of those, but they had their own issues that they had to manage around.
So we were the, you know – unfortunately, we got the short end of that as a sport. But we're working with them and hope to eliminate that from happening in the future.
How healthy is the sport right now? You have teams that built this thing. The Pettys are struggling terribly, trying to merge. You know, Wood brothers are on their last leg, trying to figure out a way to keep racing. And it's hard to go out and get $26 million bucks. You have teams trying to get multiple sponsorships to stay on the racetrack. In your estimation, how healthy is it? In this economy, is it the worst the sport has seen monetarily since the early '70s?
BRIAN FRANCE: Let me say that obviously, it's very difficult. It's on our whole industry. And there are always some unfunded teams. Now, that's not anything new. One of my goals and one of our goals is to have a system where you don't need $26 million to put a competitive team forward. So that is one of the things NASCAR has a lot of influence on and we're working all the time to figure that out.
But there is no question that with advertising and marketing budgets coming under lots of pressure, that we are, as I've said for many months now, we will not be immune to those kinds of reviews.
I would tell you, the good news is that we're talking about 90% of the industry is sponsors, or more, speaking of the Sprint Cup Series. And we have brought on some new companies that will be ready in place for 2009. And sponsorship values are at an all-time high as to what they deliver for companies.
Now that doesn't give you a pass if the general economy contracts a lot, but it certainly helps as they look at things they can't afford to do in the future. Usually, we're one of the last things that they don't want to continue, because they know that it works so well.
Most of the companies, even in tough economic times do want to sell their products and services. So we will come out of this, and we will do our part with the rest of the sports and entertainment to weather the storm. And we've been here before with energy crisis and 9/11, and many other recessions and so on. And it's never fun. It's never easy on our team. It's never easy on us, but we'll get through it.
Every year since the Chase, we saw the points lead going into Homestead has grown bigger and bigger. Is there anything that can you do or would do, that NASCAR would consider to make the Homestead race, the season-ending race more relevant?
BRIAN FRANCE: I think you have to look at it in the general sports genre. When someone is dominant like Jimmie has been, it's easier to want to revise some system that would somehow pull him back from being so dominant and make it a closer points battle. But that would be number one. Wouldn't even be right.
But secondly it misses the point. We have a system that, if everybody performs well, we have more people that have a shot at the Championship down the stretch. That's undeniable. You have to make the Chase in the first place.
And history as you unfold, we're in our fifth year, as history will unfold, we'll have a period of years where someone will be as dominant as Jimmie and it will go down in the history books. Then there will be other years where that won't happen, and we'll have a number of years of historically tight championship battles. That will be terrific, too.
So all we want is the right playoff format, and then if somebody's dominant, they're dominant. If they're not, well that will be terrific.
Considering how much NASCAR is effected by outside economics, has this downturn served the limits of NASCAR's growth? Once this downturn is over, would the sport go back to the old days, old business model, everything doing great? Or does it have to get leaner and meaner and do things have to change with the business model?
BRIAN FRANCE: No, it needs to get leaner and meaner all the time, in terms of what it cost for race teams to field a competitive team. And that is an ongoing effort of ours. We're going to be more aggressive on it.
In fact, there are lots of areas that NASCAR could cut. And I'm speaking now of the sanctioning bodies that we won't. Because when this economic turn turns around, our – we're going to be very aggressive continuing to go after a bigger fan base. Get more people interested in NASCAR. That's why we're not going to discontinue a lot of the things that are long-term benefit to the sport. Everyone can win when we get more on solid ground.
What we've talked about the economy is two things for us; It's obviously the sponsorship which we've talked a lot about today, and the pressure on our fans to attend the events. Those are the two critical areas. So we have – so we've got to take caution out of the system – cost out of the system and all that.
But we can't do things that don't look at attracting new fans in the future. We're based around trying to make this sport bigger and not smaller.
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