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Talladega Takes Another Bite Out Of NASCAR Team Financials

Charlotte, NC (October, 8th, 2012) – If you use $125,000 as the average cost of a 2012 NASCAR Cup Series racecar, more than $3.1 million dollars were lost in the 25-car wreck on the final lap at Talladega Sunday afternoon.

Yikes.

The financial numbers got only worse for the teams who came home from Talladega with little more than a box of twisted sheet metal when you throw in an additional $75,000 in operating costs for the weekend.

Two hundred grand.

Gone.

Vaporized.

Based on the $200K per race operating number, only winner Matt Kenseth and runner-up Jeff Gordon made money Sunday each taking home more than that amount in the total prize package of $5,373,101 posted for the race.

Everyone else took a financial bath.

Big time.

Welcome to Talladega. Thanks for coming.

Since 1969, Talladega has been chewing up racecars in massive wrecks that have simply become known as ‘The Big One.’ Sunday’s last-lap incident was just the latest in high-speed car crunching, spinning, sliding, flipping and flying race action at the track.

Is this really necessary?

Forget the inherent danger in 20 or more drivers blasting into each other in a 200 miles-per-hour crash. Suspend any thoughts on the secondary impact these kinds of senseless wrecks make on championship races and outcomes.

Just consider the money lost.

It’s one thing to ask a team to present a car to race fully knowing it might get crashed during an event. That’s part of the risk of racing. It’s a completely different thing when you EXPECT to bring home little more than the steering wheel and bucket of bolts.

That’s the expectation at Talladega.

Daytona too.

Four times a year, you expect to get ‘junked.’ Do the math and that’s three quarters of a million dollars per team on the hook.

Easy come, easy go?

Hardly.

Heck, everyone is having trouble making money in this economy right now. Last week, International Speedway Company, the parent of NASCAR, posted a $1 million net loss for its fiscal third quarter, down from a $9.7 million profit for the same quarter a year ago.

Bottom line for NASCAR?

Revenues fell sharply from $150.3 million in fiscal third quarter 2011 to just $115.9 this year – a 22.9 percent drop over the same period this year.

Ouch.

Maybe ISC/NASCAR feels the team owner’s financial pain, maybe they don’t.

What we do know that if NASCAR had to destroy 25 to 50 percent of the equipment it owns – safety vehicles, scales, template cages, etc. – at the four Talladega and Daytona races a year, they’d be screaming a lot louder than some of the drivers and team owners who were totally pissed after the latest Talladega ‘Big One’ Sunday.

They’d also be looking a lot harder to change it.

In the blink of an eye, Sunday’s last-lap crash at Talladega totaled more than $3 million in lost equipment.

Forget whatever aesthetics this kind of racing rules package/format produces.

Financially, it just doesn’t make sense.

“That cost a lot of money right there,” said Dale Earnhardt, Jr. in a candid interview after he was involved in Sunday’s crash. “If this is how we are going to race and that is how we are going to continue to race and nothing is going to change I think NASCAR should build the cars. It would save us a lot of money.”

Amen Junior. Preach on brother.

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