NASCAR: Four-car Sprint Cup team cap is needed now more than ever
CONCORD, N.C. – NASCAR has no intentions of revisiting its cap of four NASCAR Sprint Cup teams per racing organization.
Roush Fenway Racing must cut from five Cup teams to four after the 2009 season and team officials said today that because of the economic climate, it might be in NASCAR’s best interest to reconsider.
NASCAR announced the team cap in November 2005, and Roush Fenway was given until the end of 2009 to get down from five to four teams because it had existing contracts that ran through this season.
“We have not changed our mind on this,” NASCAR President Mike Helton said Thursday during the Sprint Media Tour. “As a matter of fact, it's probably stronger than it's ever been, and we believed it's the right thing to do when we announced it. We believe it's the right thing to do today.
"That move of a cap of ownership on cars that you've got on the race track was a piece of a bigger puzzle with the rules and regulations on motors, on tires, on different things that we've done over the past several years, and an effort to minimize the barrier of entry for car owners because we have to have race cars to do what we do, and they come from car owners.”
NASCAR says that 15 new teams have submitted Cup cars to be certified this year. According to Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby and other recent announcements, those teams would include Tommy Baldwin Racing, TRG Motorsports, Nemco Motorsports, Mayfield Motorsports, R3 Motorsports, Germain Racing, Phoenix Racing and others.
“The path we were on, which was going to be five, six, seven – you heard from some of the team owners, ‘I'm on my way to eight,’ – what that would have done is it would have made it virtually impossible for [these new teams],” NASCAR Chairman Brian France said. “When you are coming in with a one- or two-team approach, and the super teams are the only … model that is successful, that would have been a huge deterrent for new team owners. And that's why we did the limit in the first place.”
In addition to hoping that the cap would limit the barriers of entry, Helton said the cap also could have helped NASCAR avoid a devastating collapse during an economic crisis.
“Let's say there could have been an owner out there with eight or 10 teams, and in today's environment with car owners moving around to try and survive and our interest in keeping the quality of the racing on the race track at the fans' expectations, imagine what it would be like if an owner that had eight or 10 cars had financial problems and shut his garage down, how hard that would be to supplement the field of cars in the Cup garage,” Helton said.
“Relate that to today's environment. That's not what we saw in the crystal ball four or five years ago, but it's part and parcel to the decision we made.”
