If I had asked you before this week how much money NASCAR makes in a given year after it’s spent millions and millions of dollars in expenses, what would your guess have been?
$300 million?
$250 million?
I’m not sure what my answer would have been. But I feel confident that it wouldn’t have been what the apparent reality was, at least in 2024.
Christmas came early, kids! It turns out we didn’t have to wait until a potential Dec. 1 court date to get a look at the financial records of NASCAR. Nope, we just had to hold out until Oct. 29, one day before the start of NASCAR’s championship weekend.
As I write this, the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series is holding its practice session and a settlement hasn’t been announced in 23XI Racing/Front Row Motorsports’ antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR
Frankly, that’s shocking. Because this has turned into a bad week for NASCAR.
First, the main topic of conversation is not the crowning of NASCAR’s newest champions. Everyone is talking about the slew of court documents that have been shared on social media by the likes of Bob Pockrass, Matt Weaver and more over the last 24 hours.
Specifically, a lot of talk has been about that $100 million number, which was the final net income after NASCAR had $1.4 billion in revenue.
This was down $400 million from the previous year, a sum explainable by NASCAR’s selling off much of the land where Auto Club Speedway once sat.
Is $100 million a lot of money? You betcha.
I mean, why do you think NASCAR Xfinity Series team owner Tommy Joe Martins posted this a few hours after Pockrass’ tweet about it?
If I had to take a guess, some of Martins’ displeasure stems from one thing: race purses.
How much is the total race purse for the NASCAR Cup Series championship race?
$12 million.
How much in the Xfinity Series?
$2 million.
Last week at Martinsville Speedway, the Cup purse was $9 million compared to $1.6 million for Xfinity.
I have to wonder what Truck teams are thinking, given that its purse at Martinsville was $782,900.
NASCAR also reported that it spent $684 million on “track and team payments.” How much of that payment went to Xfinity and Truck series teams?
Now let’s talk about charters, which is why this whole lawsuit happened to begin with.
How much does one chartered Cup car earn per points race, as its base level?
Let’s see what’s behind door number two!
So over the course of 36 points races, one chartered car earns about $5 million.
That’s a lot of money, right? Relatively speaking, sure. But Frontstretch’s editor-in-chief, Tom Bowles, put that total into perspective.
There’s only one word I can think of in response to this comparison: woof.
One of the best parts of this batch of documents is the race purse payout curve.
Now, years after NASCAR stopped reporting it, we can determine how much the winning race team will earn. Whoever finishes first in Sunday’s Cup race at Phoenix Raceway will get 5.16% of $12,394,135.
That’s $2,401,964.15.
There’s a lot of good, newsworthy information out of the discovery documents we’ve been gifted. But the best one doesn’t have anything to do with accounting numbers.
It’s a personal letter written by Joe Gibbs Racing co-owner Heather Gibbs — wife of the late Coy Gibbs and mother of Ty— to the members of the France family in May 2024.
It’s worth the read; it shows the unique perspective of one of NASCAR’s biggest teams and gives a glimpse at some of the tension that’s played out behind the scenes over the last two years (if not longer).
Gibbs closed out her letter — which implored NASCAR to commit to “permanent or evergreen” charters — with this: “When all the stakes are on the table, teams need to know their worth is valued and secure. NASCAR has the guarantee that teams are ‘in it’ for the long run, and teams have assurance from the sanctioning body that their charters are secure.
“If there was anything to decide to move the team forward it will be trust in them, the owners, the legends and leaders of your sport with a permanent spot in your history book.”
The NASCAR community has been given a lot to chew on this week.
Now we wait for 12:15 p.m. ET on Friday, Oct. 31. That’s when Steve Phelps and Steve O’Donnell will be the likely participants in the year-end State of the Sport press conference.
Let’s see how long it takes for someone to ask them about championship weekend.
I don’t find Heather Gibbs’ argument compelling from a charter perspective. To me, charters are a part of the problem. Her letter smells of entitlement and privilege.
Also, let’s not include a “prayer” in what is a business negotiation. It seems this is a tactic to use God in order to gain some sort of moral high ground, when this is all about money, not piety. We’ve seen this before…injecting God into places which are inappropriate is a Gibbs family trait.
For so many years, the system guaranteed the top 36 in points a starting position. At the beginning of the next year, the top 36 from the prior year were guaranteed, I believe until after race seven, then the current year standings were used.
NASCAR clearly needs to share profits in order to weather the current storm. Keep the books open, and guarantee a percentage of prior year profits will be awarded to teams.
Rather than giving more money to the chartered teams, eliminate the charters and pump the money into purse winnings. Good teams will prosper. Small teams may make enough money to grow into large teams, if they have good enough people. We might actually see full fields with some regularity again, and it would make qualifying more important, and therefore more interesting as well.
Sure, under the old system once in a blue moon a major name or team would miss a race. But, these were essentially always teams which had bigger problems, and the natural course of attrition in business was taking its course.
As it currently stands, unless someone is already rich, they cannot afford a charter, and therefore they cannot grow as a team. I’m no fan of modern day Richard Childress, but this is exactly how he earned his way to prominence. And make no mistake…he did earn it. His own small team, hard work, and smart hiring decisions. A story like RCR could not happen under the current structure.