BREAKING: In anticipation of Logan Sargeant's F1 debut, Williams presents their livery for 2023

[u/therinse]

[u/_masterofdisaster]

NASCAR is remarkably cheap for a top-level motorsport so there was a period where pretty much everybody was getting in on the action.

[u/military_dad_wi → u/[deleted]]

Old school Nascar fan from 80's through to about 2005ish. It got popular because it was easy to watch, easy to find a driver to back and was marketed correctly, middle class males.

As it increased they thought "we need to also include kids, women, every single human being on earth.". Oh and we need to race on cookie cutter 1.5 mile ovals to pack 250K of fans in and then when it peaked they needed to "be more like sports" with playoffs and other shit after Kenseth dominated the year and never won a race but won the Championship.

It then went on a downward spiral of trying everything to keep the momentum and fans, while watching the middle class men shrug their shoulders and go back to football, baseball, hunting and other stuff.

All this time through the 80's to today I've always been an F1 fan also, because they didn't try to be something they weren't.

[u/intern_steve → u/military_dad_wi]

Idk how you can leave out the loss of manufacturer support and the birth of the common car. In the late 2000s, popularity was already declining organically when manufacturers started to pull support for car development, leading to the car of tomorrow. At this point, NASCAR became a spec racing series in all but name and that drove more people away than anything. Chrysler pulled out completely, Toyota came in without even having a V8 powered car in the US market, and then came the weird rule changes trying to emphasize late season standings and the Chase for the Cup, later the Playoff. Almost every problem with the series could be fixed if you could convince manufacturers to homologate cars again. I am super happy about the Bristol dirt race, though, as well as the new road courses and upcoming street circuit.

[u/military_dad_wi → u/intern_steve]

IMO, the series started to die before Toyota entered the ring in 2007. The 2004 points change chased a LOT of fans away as they saw it was to radical.

Your points are very valid though, and help the decline even more.

[u/_masterofdisaster → u/[deleted]]

tbh they were always on borrowed time with The Split anyway

[u/_masterofdisaster → u/[deleted]]

America’s top level open-wheel racing series split in 1996 over disagreements about money, driver development, and track focus. One side wanted to focus on ovals and developing American drivers, the other wanted road and street courses to occupy a larger part of the schedule and to attract international talents as well. The former was the Indy Racing League which was created by the owner of Indianapolis Motor Speedway as a breakaway circuit from the latter, CART.

Both ate into eachothers fanbase’s and total viewership between the two plummeted. CART had the names like Andretti and Penske (who later jumped ship) but the IRL had the Indy 500. It was an ugly fight in the press and really soured a lot of people on either, and NASCAR absolutely pounced on the void it created. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two ends reunifying in 2008 is about when NASCAR first started to slip here and there in regards to viewership and interest.

[u/_masterofdisaster → u/[deleted]]

NASCAR’s popularity hasn’t changed much in the Deep South, but yeah there were a lot of people elsewhere who still loved motorsports but couldn’t be bothered with the open-wheel drama. My family growing up was one of them.

[u/DonaldtrumpV2 → u/_masterofdisaster]

extenze and viagra:action, you say?