Bob Pockrass: Driver development woes bigger concern than lack of rookies
JTG Daugherty Racing's Marcos Ambrose is nearing the end of his first full season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. // Lee Holmes, NASCAR Scene
COMMENTARY
It’s the last week of the 2009 season, and so far, there are no rookies who are slated to run the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule.
That seems to be a little bothersome on the surface. There should be newcomers to the sport, every year, right? The sport needs young, or at least new, talent coming into the sport to help it grow when the older drivers decide to hang it up.
Brad Keselowski will be a rookie of sorts next year, but he has run 14 races in the series this season and won’t be considered a rookie as far as “official status” goes. It’s kind of similar to the best driver this year in his first full-time Cup ride ‑ Marcos Ambrose.
But let’s be realistic. Are there really any young Nationwide drivers out there who are ready to step up for a full-time Sprint Cup ride? It doesn’t look like it yet. Sure, there are guys who have potential – such as Penske Racing’s Justin Allgaier – but there has been no driver who has proven he is consistently strong enough to immediately step up to the Cup level.
The sad part is that few sponsors are really interested in helping develop talent, and teams can’t afford to develop the talent without sponsors. The Home Depot did that this year with Joey Logano, even though one of its main rivals, Lowe’s, is on the car that likely will win a fourth consecutive NASCAR title. The only other Cup rookies are Scott Speed and Max Papis, who have had long relationships with their sponsors.
Roush Fenway Racing has long shown a commitment toward building young talent, even if it doesn’t pan out for them to have a Cup spot open. That commitment has included full seasons for guys such as Erik Darnell and Colin Braun in the Camping World Truck Series and next year will include Braun and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in the Nationwide Series. And when Roush Fenway has its drivers do a partial schedule, it typically is half a season. That’s not the best of situations, but it’s way better than the five-race or 10-race deals most teams put together for a development driver.
Anything less than half a season for a development driver isn’t development at all. It’s fill-in. And it’s wrong to expect some great performance when a driver is in a car once a month. There’s no way a driver can know how the car is supposed to feel when the driver isn’t consistently in the seat. It’s wrong to expect a young driver who has never been to the track before to know how to race it.
With the economy the way it is, it doesn’t seem likely this trend will change. Sponsors are opting to do limited Cup deals instead of full Nationwide seasons. Even as much as Logano was touted as the next great talent, Joe Gibbs Racing was having a hard time trying to find a sponsor for him for a full Nationwide season before it opted to put him in a Cup car.
In some ways, it’s hard to blame the sponsors. No driver without Cup experience has won the Nationwide or Truck titles in the last four years. The last four Nationwide titles have gone to Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards, Clint Bowyer and now Kyle Busch. It was in 2004 and 2005 that Martin Truex Jr. won back-to-back titles and then moved to Cup. On the Truck side, no young driver since Travis Kvapil in 2003 has won that title. There seems to be little incentive for sponsors to go with a young driver when the veterans of the sport are dominating on NASCARS’s developmental tiers.
So is not having a rookie in the Cup class of 2010 a big issue? Well, yes. Not because there needs to be rookies every season, but because of the sorry state of the development of young drivers in the sport today.
