Ask any sports fan who doesn’t follow NASCAR to name you a current NASCAR Cup Series driver.
Maybe they can list off Chase Elliott, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace. Maybe they can name those five. Maybe.
Three of those are holdovers from NASCAR’s peak in popularity, and Harvick retires at the end of the year, so you’re about to lose him from this list. One is the son of the most popular driver from the booming 1990s. The final of those five is perhaps best known for the wrong reasons: the unfortunate noose mix-up.
Kyle Larson and William Byron are two of the top stars in Cup this year, and Larson has a dominant season and championship to his name, but I bet non-NASCAR sports fans aren’t familiar with either of them.
Maybe they know Ross Chastain because of the Hail Melon at Martinsville Speedway in 2022, and perhaps they’re aware of Austin Dillon from his USA reality show. But they’ve probably already forgotten both of their names.
This week, I interviewed NASCAR Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace (look for the interview on the Frontstretch Podcast), and it hit me while I was doing it that Wallace’s name is probably still more recognizable to non-NASCAR fans than majority of the current drivers despite not racing since 2005. I went to an autograph signing of his at a local car dealership back in 2003, when I was 11 years old, and the line wrapped around the building and then some. It took hours of waiting in line to see Wallace.
Would that happen out in public, not at the racetrack, with any of today’s drivers?
And Wallace wasn’t even one of the most popular drivers at the time. Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart were much more recognizable then.
You ask any non-NASCAR sports fan probably over the age of 30 if they’ve heard of those names, and I guarantee they have. They probably also remember names like Dale Jarrett, Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte, Mark Martin, and most of all, Bill Elliott.
So why? Why are the names of the 1990s and 2000s still so much more recognizable than those of today?
More people were buying tickets to races and watching it on TV back then, of course. And there are plenty of reasons both in and out of NASCAR’s control as to why that popularity dipped.
But still, NASCAR is probably in line with the 1980s as far as popularity goes. Yet those calling the shots of that era did such a better job of selling the names of Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison and Elliott.
A big part of it was the marketing was done much better. Frontstretch‘s Stephen Stumpf already did a fantastic job detailing how NASCAR could do a better job marketing the Cup Series itself, so give that article a read to see what some fixes could be on that front.
But NASCAR needs to do a better job of marketing the drivers too, the stars of the show. How often does anyone tune into a movie where they don’t know any of the actors?
Stumpf touched on how NASCAR could do a Netflix docuseries, not a USA Network one, like F1 and the PGA have done to draw interest from younger viewers.
NASCAR has had two shots to promote itself and its drivers on Netflix. One was the Bubba Wallace docuseries, which was really well done, but it’s too polarizing of a topic to attract droves of new fans (don’t get mad at me for that statement, I’m just saying that’s how some are). The other was The Crew, a comedy (and I use that term loosely) that did the series no favors and was canceled after one season.
NASCAR did do a good job with Chase Elliott’s return by having him go on The Pat McAfee Show and ESPN’s SportsCenter. But I bet Alex Bowman won’t get that same kind of push when he returns from injury. He is a playoff driver for a powerhouse team in Hendrick Motorsports, but no one outside of NASCAR circles knows who he is.
Outside of some shows on USA, you really don’t see a lot of the drivers outside of NASCAR circles. Part of that comes from the dip in popularity.
I’m sure Ryan Blaney would do a phenomenal job on Saturday Night Live (unlike Gordon, whose hosting stint was referred to by Jimmy Fallon as one of the worst episodes ever), but SNL ain’t exactly calling these days. And the cameo opportunities in movies like Earnhardt and Gordon had probably aren’t there either, but they would be if NASCAR got its drivers up in mainstream recognition just a few notches.
One achievable thing: whenever FOX or NBC broadcast the Super Bowl, the most recent champion or the defending Daytona 500 winner should be there at the game, on the field, promoting the Great American Race before kickoff. Everyone is watching the Super Bowl. When they see some unknown dude promoting the Daytona 500, it’ll lead to many Google searches for that driver. Instead, there is usually some lame, tired commercial during the Super Bowl.
But even simpler and more effective than that, NASCAR and its TV partners need to go back to making these drivers transcend from the races they are in into the viewers’ homes like they did in the 1980s-2000s. Help the viewer get to know them. I still feel like I know Rick Mast better than a great number of the Cup drivers today, and he never even won a Cup race.
Part of that isn’t the TV partners’ fault, as sponsorships and team PR keep drivers from showing their personalities these days. Part of that isn’t NASCAR’s fault (but penalizing Hamlin for showing personality is), as drivers hiding in their motorhomes at the track has killed that connection with fans. I maintain the formation of the motorhome lot was the worst change of the past 30 years. Prior to that, the drivers were forced to be out and about among the fans a lot more.
But part of it is NASCAR’s fault. There’s no money in the feeder series, so the only ones making it out of them are primarily rich kids to whom fans can’t relate. Winston, Busch and other sponsors pumped enough into those series back in the day that it gave hard-working, relatable drivers the opportunity to catch the eye of Cup teams.
Having a series filled with rich kids isn’t a damning thing at all, though. F1 has that, and its drivers are gaining popularity. It’s what NASCAR has done from a competition standpoint that is capping how big its stars can become.
Sports gain mainstream attention through dominant athletes. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tiger Woods and Tom Brady became larger than life by dominating their respective sports, and said sports benefited from it.
NASCAR’s rise into the mainstream came via domination by Petty, Waltrip, Allison, Earnhardt, Bill Elliott, Rusty Wallace and Gordon through various years. Having Petty, the most well-known and dominant driver at that point, win the first flag-to-flag televised Daytona 500 and win his 200th race with President Ronald Reagan there were two huge moments for NASCAR in the mainstream. Double-digit win seasons in which they won championships helped launch Earnhardt and Gordon to fame.
But with as much parity as NASCAR has brought into Cup now via the Next Gen car, the playoffs and a crapshoot championship race, the days of a dominant athlete are extinct. Larson’s 2021 season was the last remnant of that.
The other thing that puts athletes in the mainstream is winning big events. NASCAR used to have that — the Daytona 500, the spring race at Talladega Superspeedway, the Coca-Cola 600 and the Southern 500 all used to be much bigger deals than they are now. Those and a few other races made up the crown jewels, and many of them within the same season gave a driver all kinds of notoriety.
First, you had the Triple Crown, then the Winston Million and finally the Winston No Bull 5. And while these big races didn’t amount to a lot in the championship picture, fans tuned in to watch whether a star driver could win multiple crown jewels within a season and get a huge payday to along with it.
He won his first Most Popular Driver award in 1984, but Bill Elliott grew to even bigger popularity by winning the Winston Million the following year. It earned him the nickname Million Dollar Bill, which stuck for quite a while.
In 1997, Gordon both had a dominant championship season and won the Winston Million. The following year, Gordon had a guest spot on the sitcom Spin City. Anytime you’re in something with Michael J. Fox, that’s a huge deal in my book.
Alas, the crown jewel races are barely treated as crown jewels now. The invention of the playoffs essentially made all races the same, bonuses for winning multiple crown jewels went away, and NASCAR no longer releases driver winnings, so none of it matters.
The only race with really any added emphasis is the championship race at Phoenix Raceway. But who cares about any race at Phoenix?
That’s why Hamlin’s idea to have a summer bracket was such a refreshing idea, as something like that would make those races big deals and give the ultimate winner some exposure and payday, which fans do in fact care about.
Yes, the All-Star Race pays $1 million to the winner, but that amount doesn’t mean as much as it did over 20 years ago when it was the same payout. Apparently inflation never reached NASCAR’s purses.
Whether NASCAR goes with Hamlin’s idea or another, it needs something to give drivers more platforms to become stars again.
Otherwise, once Harvick, Hamlin, Busch, Chase Elliott and Bubba Wallace are gone, we’ll have a field of strangers.
Michael Massie joined Frontstretch in 2017 and has served as the Content Director since 2020.
Massie, a Richmond, Va., native, has covered NASCAR, IndyCar, SRX and the CARS Tour. Outside of motorsports, the Virginia Tech grad and Green Bay Packers minority owner can be seen cheering on his beloved Hokies and Packers.