Mammoth Blog

The story goes that American Revolutionary War patriot Paul Revere rode through the New England countryside shouting: "The British are coming, the British are coming" to warn about enemy troop movements. More than two centuries later, American stock-car racing fans - a hardy breed of patriots themselves - are issuing a call to arms of their own: "The French-Canadians are coming, the French-Canadians are coming."

At least, that was the tack taken this past week by a worried Ohio sports columnist on the eve of stock car racing's Super Bowl, today's season-opening Daytona 500 NASCAR spectacle in Daytona Beach, Fla. (2 p.m., TSN, FOX).

Like many among the legions of diehard fans that make up NASCAR Nation, Mark Mackey wonders whether the growing invasion of foreign-born drivers - two of them from Quebec - will accelerate the popular race car circuit's slow move away from its good-ol'-boy Southern roots.

Jacques Villeneueve and Patrick Carpentier didn't qualify for this weekend's historic 50th Daytona 500, but along with drivers from Europe and Latin America they have become the latest targets of NASCAR traditionalists unhappy with the controversial changes over the past few years.

Some of those changes - blander cars, longer races and a longer season, "playoff" races, increasingly predictable outcomes, rising ticket prices, stricter discipline for misbehaving drivers, greater sponsor influence, non-American cars - appear to have already hurt NASCAR's popularity.

"NASCAR has become like wrestling - orchestrated finishes and phony feuds," reads a common refrain on NASCAR's massive blogosphere, which overflows with resentment and resignation. "It used to be the drivers were ordinary guys we could relate to - now they are just rich young guns who could care less about the fans."

After 15 years in the fast lane, NASCAR's television ratings in the U.S. fell 21 per cent between 2005 and 2007 (they dropped 12 per cent on TSN in Canada between 2006 and 2007). Some major newspapers, including several in the South, have reduced their NASCAR coverage.

And for the first time in decades, ticket sales took a significant dip at many tracks in the past two years, even at some smaller courses where scalpers used to command top dollar for scarce seats.

Not that NASCAR is in trouble exactly. It's still the second most watched sport on American television - only the NFL does better - and NASCAR merchandise outsells that of any sport in North America.

In Canada, a recent Ipsos-Insight poll suggested 6.8 million Canadians - and one in four adults - consider themselves NASCAR fans. That's a million more than 2004. An estimated 350,000 Canadians have travelled to the U.S. to see a race.

But even NASCAR's chief executive officer and some drivers agree something is not quite right.

In his annual state-of-the-sport address last month, CEO Brian France acknowledged that perhaps too many changes were introduced too quickly and that maybe it was time to "get back to the basics" - or at least give a nod to some of the traditions that gave NASCAR its down-home charm.

"NASCAR has gotten off in some bad directions in the past few years," Bill Elliott, a 25-year NASCAR veteran and an old-school crash-and-bang driver, told reporters earlier this month. "We need to find our way back to reclaim our grassroots fans."

But those fans seem to be looking for more than NASCAR's return to the Southern tracks it abandoned in recent years, or the reintroduction at races of country music, NASCAR's soundtrack for 50 years before getting bounced aside for rock music in the late '90s.

For starters, they want cars that remind them of the ones they drive to work - and an average of six hours to and from the races - not NASCAR's redesigned Car of Tomorrow, which will be used in every race this year for the first time.

Many fans say the CoT has robbed them of a key reason for caring about the outcome of races - brand identification - now that there is no substantive difference between a Ford, Chevy, Dodge or Toyota, NASCAR's first foreign nameplate.

The redesigned car, a slightly larger, boxier version of the rounded stock car design used in NASCAR's modern era, is supposed to make the racing safer, save money for car owners and spice up the competition by making it easier to pass.

But drivers have complained the cars are hard to handle, making it actually more difficult to pass, and many fans view it as another sign of the sport's corporatization.

"I can relate entirely to the fans on this one," race team owner Beth Ann Morgenthau complained at the end of last season. "Everybody's a clone. It's not fun being a clone. Why bother having Dodge written on a car, or Chevy on it, or Ford or Toyota on it? Why doesn't NASCAR just make the cars and give them to us and be done with it?"

In its longing to capture a wider mainstream audience, NASCAR might have "dangerously" watered down its product. And that's especially true when it comes to NASCAR's efforts to rein in the colourful personalities of its drivers by overzealously penalizing rough driving during races and emotional outbursts later.

In the early days, it was common for drivers to leap from their steaming, banged-up cars at the end of a hotly contested race and exchange blows. In 1979, NASCAR's first nationally televised flag-to-flag race at Daytona Speedway ended with Cale Yarborough and Bobby and Donnie Allison flailing and kicking at the finish line.

Although light fines were handed out, such incidents were once encouraged by NASCAR officials, who saw it for what it was: a way to attract interest in a fledgling sport.

These days, in its desire to shed the sport's brawling redneck reputation - and with tens of millions of dollars of corporate sponsorship at stake - NASCAR slaps fighting drivers with large fines and suspensions and takes away valuable race points in the standings.

It hasn't worked entirely. Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch, two former champions with a history of bad blood, scuffled following an accident in practice at Daytona last weekend. After two meetings with NASCAR officials, they were put on probation and told to avoid each other, punishment that set off an online storm.

Even Dale Earnhardt Jr., probably the sport's biggest star, got on board, noting that the attention created by the fight was good for today's race.

"It needed a shot in the arm. What happened in practice gave it that. We need characters our fans can identify with."

Which brings us back to the French-Canadians, defectors from other race circuits who have joined the influx of foreign-born drivers - most of them former champions on one sort or another - switching to NASCAR in the past year or two.

NASCAR officials have encouraged the trend as a way to find a bigger international audience. They hope, for instance, that Colombian-born Juan Pablo Montoya - a former CART champion and Formula One driver who came to NASCAR last year - can add significantly to the sport's Hispanic fan base, now roughly 15 per cent of the total.

In Canada, Carpentier's second-place finish in a lower-tier NASCAR race in Montreal last year created a "good-sized spike" in viewers on TSN, says Randy Paul, managing director of NASCAR Canada.

But their arrival has not been greeted with such enthusiasm in the U.S., where sports featuring American athletes always do best.

The outsiders seem especially unwelcome in the South, particularly when you consider that not a single driver born in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee or Alabama - the heartland of the sport's storied past - won a race last season in NASCAR's top tier, the Nextel Cup (the Sprint Cup this year).

"It's hard to relate to these guys the way we could relate to Richard Petty or Bobby Allison or Dale Earnhardt," Warren Gill, a fan from Georgia in Daytona Beach for today's race, told a Florida newspaper this week. "What do I know or care about Canada?"

For now, one foreign driver - Dario Franchitti, Scottish born of Italian descent - seems to be getting a pass from all the grousing. But that has little to do with his driving - although he is the reigning Indy 500 champ - and everything to do with his wife, Ashley Judd, a gorgeous actress with Kentucky roots who created a stir everywere she went in Daytona Beach last week.

Barring total failure on the track, foreign drivers are likely to become a growing part of the future as NASCAR considers holding races in Europe and expanding its presence in Canada and elsewhere.

In the short term, NASCAR hopes to hang on to fans by lowering ticket and souvenir prices and working with hotels, and even railways and airlines, on cut rates.

Over the long haul, NASCAR hopes to broaden its base by grooming female and black drivers and by developing cars that are easier on the environment.

Some of its ideas are a bit, uh, racier. NASCAR has entered a 16-book deal with Harlequin, the leading publisher of romance novels, to promote the sport to women, who already make up 40 per cent of NASCAR's audience.

In the first book, Speed Dating, an ex-kindergarten teacher falls in love with a driver after being hit by his car and then hired to drive his enormous motorcoach from race to race. The book featured a cameo appearance by Carl Edwards, a real-life driver who helped the author create a suitable fictional representation of himself.

For the season that starts today, though, NASCAR is hoping for an old-fashioned solution to its stalled numbers: Dale Earnhardt Jr. NASCAR is hoping his move to the powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports team will signal his return to victory lane.

"Nobody sells more tickets and nobody drives television ratings more than Dale Earnhardt Jr.," Texas race promoter Eddie Gossage told the New York Times last week. "As a sport we need him to do well. When he does, it creates the Tiger Woods effect. It's win-win." source