Whither Waltrip?
I am only now watching ESPN 2’s off-season series on the ramp-up of Michael Waltrip Racing for 2007, after letting it languish on the tivo since the winter. It is especially interesting to see it now, knowing what a debacle the early 2007 season has been for Waltrip. Let me explain. No, there is no time; let me sum up:
With Toyota entering Nextel Cup competition in 2007, Michael Waltrip attempted the hitherto unthinkable - building a three-car Cup team from scratch, with a manufacturer with no Cup experience. He had some advanatges - Mikey’s main sponsor, Napa, came along with him, and when he lured Dale Jarrett to the new team, Jarrett’s main sponsor, UPS, came along too. But he still needed to build a fabrication plant from scratch, hire roughly 200 people, land a driver and sponsor for the third team, and hope Toyota held up its end of the bargain by developing competitive engines. In the event, the off season went pretty well. Waltrip successfully staffed up, including putting David Reutimann in the Domino’s Pizza/Burger King 00 car.
The problems didn’t start until Daytona. Waltrip was one of five teams penalized by NASCAR prior to Daytona, and by a wide margin the most heavily penalized - following reports of some sort of jet fuel residue in his intake manifold, Waltrip was penalized 100 points in the standings. That would have been manageable though - what has really hurt has been the difficulty in actually qualifying for races, for reasons that have little to do with the underlying quality of the drivers and cars.
Thirty-five of the forty-three slots in each race are automatically filled by the top 35 drivers in the standings, leaving everyone else to battle it out for the remaining 8 slots. The rule made some business sense in an era when there weren’t enough high-quality sponsors and teams to fill a race, helping to ensure that big-time sponsors got their cars in the race. Now, though, with Toyota’s entry and the resulting 2 new teams - Waltrip and Red Bull - trying to field a total of five cars each week, there is a surplus of well-funded teams, and as a result sponsors who commit eight figures to NASCAR sponsorship are being regularly shut out of races. The problem was put into sharp relief at Talladega, when Michael Waltrip posted the 20th-best qualifying time, yet perversely did not make the field.
The result is a horrible chicken-and-egg problem; the rules make it difficult for even very strong cars outside the top 35 to qualify, and without qualifying for races, drivers obviously can’t break into the top 35. As a result, 10 races into the season, the Waltrip drivers stack up as follows:
Jarrett - 39th, despite using up all of his past-champion provisionals to get into races early in the season
Reutimann - 42nd
Waltrip - 55th with -27 points, having failed to make up his 100 point penalty at Daytona in the only race he has yet qualified for
Team Red Bull finds itself in similar circumstances with their two drivers:
Vickers - 41st
Allmendinger - 50th
Frankly, just as a matter of sound business practice, I am surprised that NASCAR has allowed the situation to fester for so long, with long time, high profile sponsors like Napa and UPS seeing little return on their investment. Very few companies can afford to piss away the $20mm+ it costs to sponsor a competitive Cup team. In light of plateauing attendance and softening television ratings, perhaps it is just another piece of evidence that NASCAR is a mature business with its rapid growth years behind it.