Winds of Change

Have you been watching the stock market this past week or so? It's been up and down more than Jacques Cousteau.

Trouble is, I don't think we've found the bottom of this thing yet. What that means to NASCAR has yet to be seen. I do know, after looking at the ticker until I had to go Pepto myself, that "ain't none of it good," as they say in the South.

Overall economic health has been sickly for a while, and that has meant some contraction among the sponsor base. Face it, folks, we are losing sponsors quicker than Tiger Woods, and the hallway, according to my sources, is bare of new suitors.

What does this mean for NASCAR fans? Again, Wes Craven ought to be directing this horror movie. I am merely speculating, extrapolating the data into a potential real-world scenario. Prices will go up on fuel and food, as they already have of late, and I would imagine that energy en toto will "necessarily" skyrocket, according to our Commander in Chief.

That means it'll cost more to stay in a hotel, to say nothing of driving your RV or camper to the track. Prices at the track will come down or at least not rise, through competition for that rarest of commodities...disposable income, but that's about it. A sanctioning agreement is not a suicide pact, so promoters will be moved to keep the base as strong as they can.

Teams will be hit hard too, because of the contraction of sponsorship. The massive workforce will go through another slim-down, and they'll do more with less, or about the same, which means that the stuff NASCAR fans love (anything free with the logo or name printed on it) will be less in number.

These things might come to pass, might not. I'm hoping not, but it's best to walk into this with eyes wide open. Will NASCAR survive? Yes. Will it go through lean times? Also yes, because it came through 1973 just fine, and that was the last time I can remember it being this bad.

It would be nice if the financial skies would clear and everything would become rosy again, not just for NASCAR but for its fans. That's not going to be the case, at least not anytime soon, but we'll be here through it all, right alongside you.