It’s been two weeks since Martin Truex Jr. announced his retirement from full-time NASCAR Cup Series competition, which will bring his illustrious, surely Hall-of-Fame-worthy career to a close at the conclusion of the 2024 season.
Pending any truly shocking Silly Season developments, that will mean that entering 2025, only two active full-time drivers remain who competed in the 2006 season – the year of peak NASCAR, at least according to television ratings. It was the pre-Recession era stock car racing boom, the few years when NASCAR was the second-most-popular spectator sport in America and intermediate speedways were being stamped out across the country and beyond (England and Germany even got in on the action).
Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were household names. Even if you didn’t follow racing, you’d seen them on TV commercials and billboards, as cardboard cutouts at K-Mart and printed on cans of your soft drink beverage of choice.
From among the gladiators of stock car racing’s imperial period, now only Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin remain – with Jimmie Johnson, not yet adjusted to his Next Gen Toyota, in a part-time supporting role.
On its face, this doesn’t appear to be a problem. For every Kasey Kahne who called it quits, we got a Ryan Blaney in return. As was promised (perhaps a bit too early) by FOX Sports’ 2018 marketing campaign, the young guns waged war against the old guard – and prevailed. For as fast as Matt Kenseth or Kurt Busch could be, they couldn’t outrun Father Time.
The new generation of Cup Series superstars are no less talented or personable than the titans of 20 years ago. The margin from first to 36th is as close as it’s ever been. The depth of talent in the Cup Series right now is staggering. But the thing is, if you walked down Main Street in almost any city in America, (maybe not Mooresville or Indianapolis) approached someone at random, and asked them to name a racecar driver, they’d probably say, “Dale Earnhardt Jr.” or “Jeff Gordon.”
(Okay, to be fair, a lot of them would say “Ricky Bobby” in reference to Talladega Nights, a movie that came out in – wait for it – 2006.)
Earnhardt and Gordon are well-deserved Hall of Famers, the most popular drivers of the most popular era of the sport of stock car racing. Their names, numbers and sponsors are known to anyone who’s set foot in an antique store south of the Mason-Dixon. But they’ve both been retired for the better part of a decade. Their memorabilia is in antique stores.
When superstar drivers like Gordon – or Truex – retire, their legions of fans have a choice to make. Many of them switch allegiances. On X (formerly Twitter) in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen longtime Truex fans announcing plans to support Christopher Bell or Chase Briscoe once MTJ hangs up the helmet.
But – as the TV ratings of Chase Elliott’s 2023 six-race sabbatical suggests – sometimes fans give up on the sport altogether.
NASCAR isn’t a team sport. While yes, some people pick out Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing as the focus of their fandom, Bill France set the de-facto rulebook. For more than 70 years we’ve known that NASCAR’s stars are the drivers. Inevitably, these stars are going to get older.
If I had a perfect answer to why NASCAR dropped in popularity after 2006, I probably wouldn’t be revealing it in a column for Frontstretch – I’d probably be booking myself a meeting in one of those big office towers in Charlotte or Daytona Beach. But the long, slow bleed of fans who followed NASCAR for Bobby Labonte, Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, or Kevin Harvick has meant that even maintaining viewership is, in effect, a game of winning over new fans. NASCAR isn’t just trying to convince those strangers on Main Street USA to become fans of Kyle Larson, it’s also trying to win over those people who are technically NASCAR fans, but really just Harvick fans, who were rooting against Larson until November of last year.
We’re a few short years – and two inevitable retirement announcements – away from losing our last link to the time when NASCAR was appointment viewing for tens of millions, the last of the big names whose names and faces were in commercials that aired on every channel, not just in the middle of races. The Last Mainstream American Heroes.
The last gasp of the boom years’ momentum is going to come to a close, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s not like NASCAR could or should have forced Gordon to race into his 60s. In his retirement, he’s done a good job in the commentary box and a great job as an executive at Hendrick. But it’s harder to be an active Gordon fan if he’s not driving the car.
Busch and Hamlin have a lot of fans.
For my parents’ generation, one name was synonymous with driving racecars fast: Mario Andretti. Yes, he won everywhere from NASCAR to Formula 1, but Andretti was the face of the NTT IndyCar Series. My generation tends not to know who Scott Dixon is. Fifteen years from now, when Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc announce their retirements, whoever’s up next likely won’t command the same attention from forty-year-old Gen Z-er F1 fans.
I’d really like to end with a solution here, and “well, just focus on how good the racing is” isn’t working for me. One should take solace in the 2020s’ fractured media landscape, and the fact that the infrastructure exists to connect viewers to even the most niche of sports properties. Say NASCAR does lose a big chunk of Busch and Hamlin fans. We’ll still be able to watch the sport we love, and the next generation of superstars-in-waiting will still have a chance to show off their skills.
But if any of them want to be the next Gordon: not just a winning driver, but the NASCAR driver whose name everyone knows? That’s a different story.
About the author
Jack Swansey primarily covers open-wheel racing for Frontstretch and co-hosts The Pit Straight Podcast,but you can also catch him writing about NASCAR, sports cars, and anything else with four wheels and a motor. Originally from North Carolina and now residing in Los Angeles, he joined the site as Sunday news writer midway through 2022 and is an avid collector (some would say hoarder) of die-cast cars.
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The viewers didn’t leave because Gordon retired, it’s the stupidity of the product the France family keeps putting on the table. And Fox playing follow the leader with their cameras all day isn’t helping. How close to being an IROC car were the cars racing Sunday. How far away are the cars of 2006 from these. Crew chiefs can’t use ingenuity or intelligence to change how these cars run, the France family took off in all different directions with their gimmicks. It’s the cars and gimmicks that lost the viewers thanks to the France morons, not retiring drivers.
That France moron, Big Bill, built the sport TO THAT HEYDAY. The problem is negative spewing internet fans and kids with the attention spans of mayflies. Jim France is doing a good job. If any France messed it up, it was Brian and the playoff farce, stages, etc, that no one likes.