The sport of NASCAR attempts to be ever-evolving, but the biggest resource appears to have become stuck in mid-aughts marketing and left to replicate itself.
With Kyle Busch having settled into mediocrity at Richard Childress Racing, the sport has been overrun with blandness, with brash youngsters like Carson Hocevar becoming the closest thing to drama. And the reason for Hocevar’s name circulating? He has the audacity to be aggressive – hardly something that should be considered noteworthy.
Perhaps you have noticed that FOX has taken over broadcasting IndyCar races this season. Or, perhaps, you don’t follow racing or any sport that FOX holds the rights to and you have somehow also found a way to avoid the news that an asteroid will be hitting the earth at some point in the next decade.
If you missed the IndyCar news, it is logically compelling to think you might have missed the second — even if it is a complete fabrication, but one that I will now set upon the world like Orson Welles creating mass panic in 1938 by getting the public to believe that the world was being invaded by aliens.
Regardless of any doomsday scenarios being envisioned by yours truly, the FOX takeover of America’s second series of racing has been loud and constant. Of course, when a network sinks a bunch of money into acquiring a property, it is more than expected that the advertising will follow in order to capitalize on the investment. That’s just standard operation procedure.
Part of the newness of the operation is how FOX is selling the sport, and FOX has shown creativity in doing the work. Take the Josef Newgarden promo:
Often displaying all the personality of a pet rock, Newgarden has never quite shown anything of a personality that might regarded as character. But the promo does the work for him by taking a humorous slant and crafting what seems like a persona out of thin air. Well done, FOX crew, you seemingly made Newgarden likable.
Then consider Alex Palou.
Has there ever been a three-time champion about whom we know so little? Aside from being French, I barely know anything about him, even though I watched him win three championships over the past four years. Oh, right, he’s Spanish. My bad.
Again, his promo brings some sort of personality and a little bit of information that makes him seem human and not some cyborg sent from the future to eradicate competition in the IndyCar series. Again, bravo.
That FOX has helped highlight personas is a way of getting viewers to connect with the sport. And for one that has floundered in popularity ever since its CART split in the 1990s, any way of bringing more connection is vital.
All of this takes us to our NASCAR problem. One of the challenges with NASCAR is that the current crop of drivers is giving TV static as personality. That is not their fault, but instead the structure of a sport that relies on drivers being directly tied to their sponsor.
Being hemmed in by company dictums means that the drivers are continually editing themselves and skirting controversy. It’s hard to connect with a driver when they are a corporate automaton. But FOX is showing that it can be done.
One of the tricks with marketing is to find ways to sell a product that is a challenge to sell, and FOX has been failing with NASCAR. If the network can get creative with IndyCar, what is going on with their more expensive and popular product?
Sometimes marketing falls in one’s lap. The NBA had a listless run in the 1970s that saw viewership dip and the sport face economic uncertainty. In a stroke of fortune, two college stars found themselves drafted onto teams on opposite sides of the country. A natural East v. West rivalry emerged, and the NBA marketed the Boston-Los Angeles duels as high theater.
Rivalries have always been good for sports. The NFL uses divisions as a first means at rivalries and then watches as elite teams form new ones, like the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs have been playing with for the past few years. Individual sports play out differently.
During the Tiger Woods years, with no natural rival in play, the sport sold itself on Tiger v. The Field. One could argue that Formula 1 has been doing the same with Max Verstappen the past couple years, whether they wanted to or not. NASCAR, on the other hand, has not found a way to level itself in this way.
It is hard to do without some kind of personality in play. With no one dominating, and a system set up meant to practically ensure it doesn’t happen, the sport is unable to use the Tiger construct.
From a different perspective, the corporations have pushed personality so far out of the picture that everyone plays nice and we do not get to see the open animosity that existed when Verstappen was stealing the torch from Lewis Hamilton.
The way forward is for the marketers to find new enjoyment in crafting personalities from whole cloth. With comedic takes on the drivers, we can be left to wonder if anything the marketers are offering is on point. Maybe then we might find something fascinating about that NASCAR driver with three championships who is also not from France, and may or may not like crocheting when he’s bored.
As a writer and editor, Ava anchors the Formula 1 coverage for the site, while working through many of its biggest columns. Ava earned a Masters in Sports Studies at UGA and a PhD in American Studies from UH-Mānoa. Her dissertation Chased Women, NASCAR Dads, and Southern Inhospitality: How NASCAR Exports The South is in the process of becoming a book.