It’s NASCAR season

The snow no longer covers Daytona Beach, so it’s time to race.

Tom Taylor’s newsletter points out there may be trouble in NASCAR land, at least as far as radio is concerned.   That’s not a surprise to me.

NASCAR has taken a major change over the years – in the good old days, people drove to the racing venue in their RVs, parked overnight, brought lots of beer, watched a few hours of racing in the afternoon and would drive home before dark.

Then NASCAR decided it should have some of its races after dark – pandering to the TV networks rather than the crowds.    NASCAR has a very fundamental problem with radio and TV – it’s 3 or so hours of racing – the only “stop in play” is during pit stops or following crashes that stop the race.   Since what happens in the pit stop often decides the race, going to commercials during the pit stops doesn’t work either.   So you have lots and lots of yellow flags – even if it means having a non-competitive car “spin out” and do no damage to anything, but an excuse to send out the safety crews for 10 minutes to “look for debris” and get in the commercials.

So the rules of NASCAR have been evolving to make the sport media friendly – in car cameras, listening to the communications between the crew and the driver, restricting the cars so that the cars are safe and even and the race isn’t over until the final few seconds….  adding more and more races and focusing on the entire season rather than individual races…

Listening to car racing on radio is absolutely awful – I remember writing about it last year for the Indy 500 (not NASCAR) – the first half hour or so was nothing but one ad after another – front loading the show with ads because you couldn’t be sure there would be enough breaks in the action to squeeze them in later….  literally 4 minutes of ads followed by 1 minute of racing followed by more ads.    Listeners don’t get a chance to get “sucked into” the competition before the ads overwhelm them and it’s time to go listen to Pandora.    I’m sure it looks great on TV, but pandering to TV’s audience is killing it for radio.   It’s also killing it for the fans – despite lowering prices, attendance was off sharply last year.   Part of it was surely the economy, but that’s only a part of the explanation.

So in Charlotte North Carolina, close to the epicenter of NASCAR, no radio station has agreed to carry NASCAR.  WBT is carrying this weekend’s race, but that’s it.   The PPM audience measuring system is being blamed for this lack of interest in racing on radio, but the real blame lies at the feet of NASCAR – PPM is just the messenger.