iNSIDE SCOOP: Battle Lines

NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France said this week that the Race Team Alliance (RTA) was something that the sanctioning body didn't see as necessary for the sport.

It stands to reason that it wouldn't trip NASCAR's trigger to have a group of team owners--that happen to own the cars driven by nearly every top-flight star in the sport--speaking as a united front. After all, NASCAR has been around for more than 60 years without such a group, and when one was formed, it was put down with ruthless efficiency.

France maintains that NASCAR is at its best when it speaks to groups of owners, of large teams and small, individually, and he has precedent to back him up. And, as it happens, individuals often have different opinions on what should be done rather than a unified front of...demands, for lack of a better word.

“We think the benefits they would arrive at with this association would be much smaller than they do,” France said on Sirius/XM radio. “They’re smart guys and they may figure out some things that we’re not aware of.

“But on balance, I would say two things – one, the idea that they don’t know how many employees they have or what their costs are and this is a way to tackle that, that’s terrific. We certainly want them to get those kinds of answers for sure.

“The one thing that is central to NASCAR though, is when you deal with one voice, that would probably be the worst thing we could ever do – and that’s to listen to one voice, even it was a consensus voice. Every decision that we’ve ever made that was important, the more input, the more people we heard from, the better the result.”

You can take that many ways, but it stands to reason that many voices on a subject, talked to separate from the rest of the peer group, would both offer information and deny the teams a unified front to stand behind.

It's posturing, is what it is. The RTA was formed ostensibly to spur cooperation by the bigger teams on issues they face: travel, rules, efficiencies, etc. It is, in my opinion, a precursor to getting a larger say in rules changes, purse and compensation structures and how slices of what is a very large pie are divvied up.

France said that the fact that the RTA only represents the nine multi-car teams isn't a bellringer, too.

"[The RTA] is entitled to approach the business in different ways,” but NASCAR will “go down the road dealing with all of the team owners – not most of them, not the big ones, but all of them.”

NASCAR, ever since it was founded, has spoken with one voice: the France family voice. First Big Bill, then Bill Jr., now Brian, all wielded the power of the organization from a common viewpoint. It worked, for the most part, because there was logic involved to a great degree, and a single voice is hardly ever misunderstood.

“…Whenever we do something – and we’re working on all kinds of things now – these are never simple things,” France said. “Drivers, crew chiefs, engineers – we always pick their brains on things because it’s not always black or white if we go one way or that way on whether it actually lowers costs or it actually improves racing. The last thing we would want to do is not talk to everybody so where we can find where the truth lies.”

Now is the time where the truth, at least in the eyes of the RTA, is where you find it. The teams, while reaping a bunch of benefits from NASCAR's single-voiced leadership, also bear the brunt of the changes made by NASCAR, and in recent years, it's been a fairly large brunt, if you know what I mean.

The Car of Tomorrow, the next generation of it in the Gen-6...all has come with a tremendous price for the team owners, who have to build, tear up and rebuild on a fairly regular basis.

In other words, what is good for NASCAR isn't always good for the teams, who have to spend the money when NASCAR changes something or else fall behind the competition.

At the center of all this, I fear, is a struggle for control of the sport. As I've written before, that's always how it starts. It ends badly, too, for the most part, with mistrust and spite and lots of bluster. That it has not been an issue before this, with one noteable exception (Championship Drivers Association) is amazing.

There's $8.2 billion in TV money sitting there, and it is divided to benefit the tracks and and the sanctioning body. More than half that total goes to NASCAR and the International Speedway Corp., and the teams and drivers are in line for a quarter of the total.

Naturally, track owners like ISC and Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports, Inc. are not at all unhappy with the 65-25-10 split of the TV money, and don't feel that change is necessary. Sixty-five percent of the money goes to tracks, 25 percent to purse and 10 percent to NASCAR.

The RTA, by banding together in a unified viewpoint, could impinge NASCAR and the tracks' ability to move the sport forward according to their priorities, and that's why France is not all that enthused with the development.

For its part, the RTA hopes to cut costs for its members while working with NASCAR in a collaborative effort.

“…That’s the high road and the right road, so why do anything other than that?,” said Michael Waltrip Racing co-owner Rob Kauffman told USAToday/NBCSN's Nate Ryan recently. “There are other questions that are obvious and will be resolved over time. To the extent we’re a party to those, we’ll try to be productive and collaborative. We’ll see how it plays out. It makes for a less exciting story, but a better business.”

I fervently hope so, because the alternative would hamstring both sides faster than you can say "he said/he said."

Read the entire story here.