NASCAR president Steve Phelps delivered his State of the Sport address Friday.
“The first time I had the opportunity to do this was in 2018 in Miami,” he recalled. “At that particular point the sport was going through some challenges, some headwinds, right? Those were real. I think we felt that.
“I remember using the phrase that our best days are ahead. I think the results that we have seen are more than encouraging. I'm very proud of them. It really took an industry coming together in order to make that happen. It took race teams, our broadcast partners, our sponsors, tracks that we own or tracks that we don't own, that all came together to create an opportunity for our sport to grow, which is exactly what's happening.”
Among his key points:
The Next Gen car: "This car has been tested, run, more collaboration than any other new car in the history of this sport. Not even close," he said. "The Gen-5 car that came out, we ran a test in January before we raced it at Bristol for the first time.
"I am confident, and we check all the time on supply chain issues. As of now there are no issues. We'll continue to monitor that because it's important. If you got 30 major components to the car, you only have 29 of them, you have a problem. Until the car is on the racetrack, we'll continue to give it all the attention that it deserves, which is a lot."
NASCAR is continuing to work on steering issues and the heat inside the car: "We've got some solves for that that the drivers I believe are feeling more satisfied with."
More reporting from Jordan Bianchi here.
On the current relationship between the drivers and NASCAR’s executives: “I would say we went through a stretch in the summer where the drivers felt that they didn't know enough about the safety of the Next Gen car and were vocal about it.
“We had repeatedly met with the drivers to try to alleviate their concerns about safety. With that said, they weren't in a good spot. We just kept meeting with them, making different opinions and experts available to them, specifically around the test that we did down in Daytona.
“I think the drivers are satisfied with the answers that they heard. I would say as we looked at kind of June, July, early August, that's probably a fair statement that the drivers and the sanctioning body were not on the same page. But I think right now I believe the drivers feel good about the direction of the Next Gen car both from a drivability standpoint, since most of them had the opportunity to drive it now, and from a safety perspective.
"Do I think that the communication between our drivers and the sanctioning body can improve? Yeah, it can. It's going to. I think there's some different things that we've spoken to some veteran drivers about that will address some of those. ... Steve O'Donnell and I met individually with, I don't know, 12 or 15 drivers to make sure they were comfortable with the direction we're moving in.”
Digital and social numbers are the highest they've been since 2015.
On television: “If you consider our share numbers since 2019 in our Cup Series, it's up 18 percent, which is hard to do at this point. It's just hard,” Phelps said.
“Then you look at our ratings for Xfinity and our Camping World Truck Series, they're up double-digits. The share in both of those series is up 25 percent to 30 percent. We are having a moment as a sport, it's important that we keep it going, which is exactly what we're going to do.”
On Auto Club Speedway's conversion to a short track: Phelps says he's "hopeful" that conversion of Auto Club Speedway from its two-mile configuration into a short track will happen by 2023, but supply chain issues and the pandemic have created "a lot of uphill battles we have from a timing perspective."
"Us adding another half-mile racetrack in a very important marketplace for us,," he said. "I'll call it the L.A. DMA, it's important. We have more fans in L.A., in that L.A. DMA, than any other DMA in the country. It's fertile ground."
On attendance: Sunday’s championship race is a sellout, coming on the heels of a big crowd at Martinsville. The two previous races at Texas and Kansas were not as well-attended.
“I think we can all agree that Texas, it wasn't our best foot forward for the year,” he said. “We're going to work with Speedway Motorsports to determine what's happening in that marketplace, then what can we do collectively that will help ticket sales in that marketplace. We've got a group that we've put together that includes Speedway Motorsports folks, it includes people at NASCAR, to address what I would suggest would be an unacceptable level of tickets sold in that marketplace.
“Obviously the facility is massive. It is a huge facility. So I think it exacerbated an issue that existed there, which they did not sell enough tickets.”
“Kansas is a track that NASCAR owns. I thought we were going to see an incredible crowd at Kansas based on the number of tickets that we sold. We sold a lot of tickets. It was above 80 percent of the capacity, which at this particular point I'd take 80-plus at most of the facilities that we have, at least right now. We are trending towards increases. Unfortunately we only scanned 60 percent of the tickets going through the turnstiles. Weather was a challenge that day, or supposed to be.
"You look at attendance, for our NASCAR tracks, we are up every single race versus 2019 with the exception of one race. That race went from one race to two races, which was Darlington. ... We aspire to be sold out everywhere. The fact that we are trending positively versus 2019, that's a good thing.
"Went through a great stretch in the summer where we had sold-out racetracks or racetracks that looked fantastic. That's what we want to do. We need to do that by doing a number of different things. We need to make sure that the marketing and promotion is as strong as it can be. We need to make sure we are driving storylines. We need to make sure the event experience is better than it's ever been.
"Are we satisfied with where that is? We're not. We're going to constantly get better. I think you'll see that this weekend."
Don't miss Jordan Bianchi's deep dive on Phelps, who spoke to him about an unprecedented period in the sport and society around it.
(Photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
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