Various news articles relating to the topic on this page below the Q&As....

2005 NASCAR Nextel Cup Interviews: Brian France & Mike Helton
NASCAR PR November 11, 2005

BRIAN FRANCE: Let me just say, the direction we're trying to get to, and of course we're talking about how do you define what is an affiliate of another team. But the thing to mention that gets lost in this, while we're going to have a hard cap, while we are going to have a way to measure that hard cap. On the other hand, we still want to get the benefits of the multi-car teams and the infrastructure they have in place as they have in the past to help us launch new teams and new team owners. So while we want a cap, we want to go in that direction. We don't want to put such a most around, you know, the teams, like Hendrick or Roush or Yates or anything of the big teams; they can't help but assist us in finding new team owners to come into the sport. So that's why it's a bit of a work-in-progress to try to get to the right place.

MIKE HELTON: What is first certain, what we announced is that beginning in '06, there's a cap, understanding that that cap, if we institute it cleanly in '06, would put a couple of teams in a bad position, and we don't want to do that. So we're going to grandfather Roush in, and then Hendricks. For example, he had a two-year deal with Terry Labonte in the 44 car. We know going into '06 that Rick Hendricks is going to have five cars on the racetrack at least ten times next year. Once we get through all of the details of working that out with those two organizations for '06, then it's a matter of reaching that cap of four in a reasonable period of time in the future. Once we reach that cap, and as it applies to everybody else beginning in '06, there will still be a feature that will allow a four-car team to run a fifth car in a program that is getting a rookie ready for the following season with limited number of races attached to it. So it would be possible for someone to have five teams at one time, but that would be under a limitation as to who the driver could be, and the number of races you could put that car out there.

BRIAN FRANCE. It's a big change, you have to look at, that's what we're trying to do. It may not be a change sitting here today in November, but down the road several years from now if we didn't do anything, you could very well could have a situation where it's six, seven or more teams, that are under a common ownership. While there's parts of that that might not feel wrong, the reality of raising the barrier to a new car owner who is coming in in a daunting task of saying, well, I've got to own how many teams to be competitive, is it five, is it six, or whatever it might be. So we think that this is a good way to reverse that trend, but still recognize that multi-car team and the infrastructure, as I said earlier, is an important component of our growth. It's been well-noted how many teams and new teams that Rick Hendrick and Jack Roush and others have helped get into the sport, so that's a good thing. We want to preserve that. We want to give those guys a chance to sell technology, sell shortcut, if you will, to a potential new team owner. But we also don't want a concentration that's going out of control in terms of one ownership group having seven, eight, nine, ten; where would it end? So we do think we've taken a step to not only reverse it, but to stop it. I don't want to get hung up on it today. Let's just talk about the concept and I'll tell you how we get there. There are various or many definitions that are out there with the Securities Exchange Commissions, franchises, franchise law. There's all kinds of ways that we can get at the whole idea of recognizing who owns what and who is a benefit to one team or another. But remember, we're not trying to draw the ultimate moat around a team owner like Rick Hendrick whereby he can't be a supplier to a new team that's coming into the sport. So it's a fine line in terms of drawing a steel ring around the situation. We really want to be somewhat flexible. There's plenty of ways we can get at who is benefitting from another team over there and trying to disguise the idea of who owns what.

MIKE HELTON: Let me clear up something on the two-car deal. We never had a limit on two cars as far as who could own them. That limit was around the Winner's Circle Program. And that's when you saw other people in the same camp be listed as a car owner, but the entity itself was basically driving a ship, like Jeff Gordon on 48 car or Georgetta Roush on the 16 car. That's all that ever existed before. We've learned a lot from that, and like Brian said, there's the NBA has got it, the NFL, SEC, IRS. There's a million different definitions of who owns what out there. We're not after an IRS-type definition. We're after a definition that makes it work in the industry. We have no desire, like Brian said twice already, we have no desire to stop Yates and Roush from supplying engines, Hendricks from chassis and engines, Richard Childers, Joe Gibbs. Those organizations are actually making the sport better. Our fear is and has been is what happens in the future, not '06, not '07, but what if the sport -- if we didn't have a cap, what would the sport look like in ten or 15 years from now? So this isn't as much an immediate reaction as it is a reaction for the future and to lower the barriers going down the road. We think we've got a pretty good grip on one of our economic plans that has an affiliate group definition in it already. And we've been able to police that very cleanly and very well, and everybody adhere to it, and we think that gives us a good start on holding this procedure together.

BRIAN FRANCE: We considered everything and we felt like four was the number that met our short-term issues without trying to penalize too far what all of the team openers that have multi-car teams have done: Played by the rules, they have competed fairly, they have not done one thing in the wrong direction. So we have considered three, and we'll look down the road, if four is the right number, we feel like we're comfortable with that. Down the road we think that it may be different, we'll look at it but right now it's four.

Q. Do you think it helps?

BRIAN FRANCE: Oh, I think it helps. Again, whenever you have to -- if the whole idea to win is I have to go out and do, you know, climb Mt. Everest, not everybody can climb Mt. Everest. We have to lower that barrier to entry. We have to make it whether it's a manufacturer, a new team owner, a new driver, can realistically think that they can come in with a couple of teams and have an opportunity to compete fairly and evenly and all of those things, and that's what the policy is all about. I can understand that, he is the own one with five teams, so it's very understandable to think that he's disappointed. And again, Mike said it lots of times in the last couple of weeks, it's not focused on Jack Roush because Jack Roush didn't do anything wrong. He just happens to be the guy that has five and stands out and is most affected by; it's understandable to think that, but we're looking at a policy for the whole sport, not just one team owner. We were with Jack on Tuesday and Mike has been meeting with him regularly, as you can imagine. And the idea is to have a transition that is as soft a landing as possible, and we've committed to Jack that that's what we're going to do and not looking to penalize Jack for anything that he has in place today. On the other hand, there has to be at some point a transition to get him to where everybody else is at four, and we're going to work in the coming months and maybe years to figure out how to do that without crippling his organization, or that he thinks -- or not he thinks, that he's built up to a certain place. And that's going to be a bit of a work-in-progress, but we are committed to work with Jack and Jeff and Smith and the whole team there. I didn't say that. I said we are committed to working with him on a soft landing on particular agreements or situations that are contractual requirements that he's working under. So we're -- I don't know how we're going to do that yet, and I don't think he does. But he's got our commitment that we're not just going to be cavalier about it. We're going to be thoughtful and take our time with him to figure out how to make sure he has a soft landing. Because Jack Roush, he's just competed and signed up sponsors and drivers, hasn't done anything that he shouldn't have been doing. So we need to be careful, cautious, as we go down the line to make sure he has a smooth transition.

MIKE HELTON: Now, but to answer your first question, to simplify it, tire leasing is nothing new to motorsports. But what will happen in '06 in our national series is Goodyear will show up at the racetrack with all of the race tires that will be used at the event. And when the event is over, Goodyear will leave with every tire that was used at the racetrack for the event. If it coincides with our new test program, Goodyear will be at tests to provide tires for testing, but no team will leave with those tires after the test is over with, and that's how the leasing program will work. The economic package of it and everything, those things we're working out with Goodyear and the race teams. And it's not a matter of -- I'm confident that the economics is going to actually work out better for the race teams, because teams are not now going to be buying enormous amount of tires knowing that they are going to take them home after it's over with and go do something with them anyway. We'll help the teams minimize the number of tires that they even mount up at a regular racetrack. They can't use a 2006 tire to go and do anything with, other than what we do at a racetrack, and the six tests. Now, I will say that there's obviously in the pipeline, there's inventory of tires that's been used in '05 that the teams have purchased and then got back in warehouses. The value is minimized, though, because as the compounds change, then the value of being on the exact compound you're going to race on I think has some merit to it. We understand going into '06 that it's not a matter of flipping a switch on January 1 of '06 and do exactly everything we want to do. But over time, that pipeline, and we're not going to worry about trying to police that pipeline of inventory that's out there today. We're just going to worry about what happens from January 1 of '06 on, and that pipeline is going to take care of itself eventually.

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, we wouldn't do it if we thought in the future there was going to be a short of owners, or not now. There's a shortage of opportunity, but there's not a shortage of willing, capitalized individuals or people that want to get involved in NASCAR. But most of them tell me, you know, the old days of Alan Kulwicki just ten years ago, or more than ten years ago, where a single car team comes out, competes better that particular year, didn't have the biggest sponsorship agreement, had a great driver, had a great chemistry and wins the championship, those days are over. So if you can't come in and have success, you can't keep a sponsor. You can't even get a sponsor. So I'm not too concerned about that against the other side of doing nothing and hoping that down the road, that we end up in a better place; Mike and I and our whole team at NASCAR believe that's the case.

MIKE HELTON: Let me say this about that. Car counts are cyclical, and those of us that have been in the sport for a long time have seen car counts go and car counts go down. It has got nothing to do with the number of cars a team owner owns, and this decision has nothing to do with car counts in the garage and that relationship. We can go through a cycle in the future where car counts are low again, but we think, again, this move is a futuristic move as much as anything that hopes to encourage car owners to be a part of the sport. Whether or not that makes a car count 43 or 38 or 55, I don't think it has any difference on that.

BRIAN FRANCE: I don't believe that to be the case. I think if it's a quality team that we're talking about, the fifth team at some point, it doesn't happen by natural attrition, it's our hope, and I know it will be Jack's hope that that team gets new ownership, it's part of a new situation. And logic says that's probably the case. If at some point down the road, he's able to maintain five teams and everything is working properly, if we needed to transition that fifth team out, it's our expectation that a new owner would be glad to have that kind of infrastructure, and he does have five great teams and so no one would, in theory, lose their job. That would be our hope.

Q. They would lose their job at Roush, though.

BRIAN FRANCE: They would --

MIKE HELTON: Tom, wait a minute. You've got to go back to in the announcement yesterday, and we've said already today that we are going to minimize what Jack has to do to beat this cap, and we're looking at a reasonable time period. In that reasonable time period, people retire, people relocate, people go off and do other jobs, teams actually add employees. So if we do this right, and our intentions are to do this, is to sit down privately with Jack and bang out all of these details to where he understands what's coming and we work with him, and I think it actually minimizes the number of people that have to leave Roush Racing. It may fit into the scheme of things of adding new people and people retiring to before very few people actually have to leave Roush Racing.

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, the first question, again, Mike said it and I said it, it's not -- you're right. Five to four, maybe not a significant number at that point. And four right now, from a barrier to entry standpoint is what it is. It's really trying to look out for us. We see a day, and listen, the last thing Mike and I and Jim Hunter or anybody at NASCAR wants to be doing is sitting up here with tough policy that has to look out, that's conceptual. We'd like to be working on a lot of other things, but it's our job to look around the corner. And when you look around the corner, we see seven, eight, nine teams and that would be a substantial barrier to entry. Four is one thing; seven, eight or nine is another, so I would tell you that. But we didn't have any regard to the second question, we didn't have any regard to Toyota in that. They are going to have to field independent teams in terms of the manufacturer support that they give each team owner or however many team owners they are going to choose if they come in and they have not made that choice anyway to enter NASCAR at this point.

MIKE HELTON: And let me just say this, add to that, that this move by itself does not provide for the minimum barrier of entries going down the road. We've got to do rules and regulations like single rules -- single engine rules, gear rules, leasing tires. We've got to do the other rules and regulations and procedures that we've done, and I think we've got a history of doing and keep doing in order to help car owners stay in business, and entice enthusiasts and owners what wouldn't to be in the business to be in it. And so as we for several months debated over whether there even should be a cap decided yes, there should be; well, when do you put one in? I don't know. Why would you do it? Well, because the trends, as Brian mentioned in the 90s, it's been since 1995 that a single car owner has won a championship. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, but if we allowed this current trend to keep going, we could be looking here one day and say, well, it was 2005 since the last two-car team within a championship. And we don't think that's good for the sport going deep into the future. So we choose to put a cap out. Then we had to choose what the number was, and we basically do that by taking a snapshot of the garage area as it is today, analyzing statistics from the past, analyzing what we think trends will do going forward, and talking with a lot of owners about what's reasonable today. You know, I guess back in the early 80s when Junior Johnson tried the first two-car team with Darryl and Neal, everybody was screaming bloody murder back then. Well, that didn't work out, everyone went back to single cars, Alan Kulwicki won a championship as an independent owner, and everybody thought the independent owner was dead and gone. So the world has changed. But sitting here trying to look at and protect it for the future, we chose this year that there should be a cap. We chose the number four as the logical, or the one that made the most sense based on the snapshot of the industry out there today. It gives teams that are -- that have momentum going, that have two or three teams to grow, and it allows for organizations to correctly manage themselves without expectations of having to be much bigger than they are, and maybe grow so large that they are not capable of managing themselves. And then that's what led us to this number and that's what led us to this date. Now it's a matter of going down the road and doing the right thing, but this by itself is not going to fix the barrier of entries. This is a component of it, but the rulings and regulations are -- probably the car tomorrow is as important to it as this move is. We work hand-in-hand with Goodyear, and they were not pushing us to go to minimum air pressure, policing. That's something we felt like we had to do based on not the direction Goodyear was going, but based on the geometry and the engineering direction that these teams were going and the loads that they were putting on these tires and the knowledge of the tire that they were acquiring; and basically not being practical about the aware of the tires as much about the performance of the tire. And so once we realized in the latter part of this season that the line had been crossed is when we chose to police the minimum air pressures. For years, we went along, Goodyear published minimum air pressures. Everybody said, okay, and went to work on it. But as the progression of the competition has gone in the direction it has, it's just like a lot of other elements, we've had to come in and say, no, you can't do that anymore. We used to let you do that, but you can't do that anymore. This is what this was. This was a moment where we said, no, you can't do that anymore.

Q. Inaudible?

BRIAN FRANCE: It's convenient to say that when you're in a certain situation but it's really apples to oranges. You talk about the infrastructure, or the cost, rather and the capital requirements necessary to operate a track today, very little public, private partnerships that most big arenas and the NBA are the NFL or any Major League sport enjoys, the majority of all of the upgrades are made with private capital. So concentration in that case matters a little bit more for the tracks to have some bulk. And I don't think that anyone, a fan, particularly care. It doesn't affect the competition, either, how many tracks somebody owns. That doesn't affect what happens on the racetrack. The multi-car situation or the cap, plus all, as Mike well put, it's not going to be just the cap that we're going to be zeroed in on in the coming years to fix this issue or reverse some trends. It's going to be a lot of other rule adjustments that we can make. So I'll leave it at that.

MIKE HELTON: And the only thing I'll say about that is the barrier of entry in racetracks is not who owns racetracks. The barrier of entry to racetracks is how many weekends you've got. That's what limits us is how much time you spend racing. It doesn't matter who owns the racetracks. You just don't have enough weekends to go around.

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, we said the process, the rest of the year, to try to get it down it a couple of the best options and we'd be negotiating with them and hopefully announcing something early next year and we're still on that timetable. We're still working on it, no one has been eliminated. Obviously as we have done the analysis and some option in one city or another has presented a little bit better case, we'll be getting at that here in the next -- probably in the next six weeks. Probably after the holidays we'll be negotiating trying to see if we can make some more progress and then announce something in the first quarter. We'll always look at the franchising situation of it, but there are plenty of other things we need to be worried about to lower the barrier to entries, as Mike said on the rules side of the business. But I will tell you in motorsports, because everybody can say they can point to a few things or a few situations where one team owner had to leave the sport and didn't come out as well as they wanted financially, the reality of it is, while we don't have a perfect system, it's the best system in the world in motorsports for team ownership. It's the most financially viable. It's the best return. More teams are profitable here. And that's a good thing for us. That's what we're concentrating on, than any other form of motorsports by a wide margin. So every time we want to look at franchising or giving somebody an asset or whatever the case is, we're mindful that our model has worked so well for so many people that we've got to be careful.

Q. Inaudible?

BRIAN FRANCE: Again, we are starting with the NEXTEL Cup series as we typically would do, and we'll look at our national divisions, the Busch and Truck Series, as we go on to see if -- we're already doing a lot of things on the rulings side but we don't have a cap, yet, on either one of those series. If that is something that we need to consider down the road, that's something we'll look at, because the idea is pretty simple. We're trying to lower that barrier to entry, trying to get more ownership energized about coming in, fielding competitive, great cars, letting drivers get some opportunities. So we'll look at it. Right now, we're comfortable that the benefits of a lot of the NEXTEL Cup team owners coming into Busch, you know, the benefits out way the liability at this stage, but we'll look at it.

Q. How do you assess it?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I think it's been tighter if you look at the points through the -- all first eight weeks, it's been generally tighter. Although Tony Stewart has gotten out to a lead, but it wasn't nearly the significant lead that Kurt Busch had or the spacing or the gap of points from first to seventh or eighth; much tighter this year. Anything can happen this weekend, and you know, for all we know, we'll have five or six guys with a real opportunity in Homestead-Miami next week. Jimmie Johnson is certainly close. Carl Everett has three that are very, very close right now that can do it on the merits where if they just outrun somebody in a significant way, being Tony Stewart, they can have a real opportunity. So I think for more than that, to get in, I think Tony would have to have -- probably have to have some struggles over the weekend. This is of course getting down to the finale next weekend. Our television ratings have been up every event and that's notable. You say, well, okay, they are not up a lot. They are up I think four or five percent for the year, or during the Chase. Now, remember that's without Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon, our two biggest stars. So most sports, when their two biggest stars are not in the playoffs, that's a significant drop; you look at what happened in the World Series. And we're up, I think cumulative for the last two years, 16 percent. In our business, those are big numbers. So we like the momentum and we also think the fan acceptance is super high, they understand that the drivers, it's more exciting, more guys had an opportunity, all of the things you've heard me say many times. So we love the concept and it's not a concept, we love the format and we love the great, tight racing. I hope we go down into the finale like we did last year and there's as much excitement and television interest and all of the rest, and that's what we're hoping for. But we like what's going on.

JIM HUNTER: We'll take a couple more and then wrap it up.

BRIAN FRANCE: Look, we have huge Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies in the sport today, the biggest companies; Microsoft is a big company. Like we said many, many times today, we're going to work with Jack, we're going to try to make a transition that's as smooth for him as possible, but we have to get to a place that honors the policy we put out today.

MIKE HELTON: They can test, they just can't test with an '06 tire.

Q. Inaudible?

MIKE HELTON: You'd have to ask the crew guys. That's not the information we get, though. Part of the analysis of whether or not we wanted to go through the exercise of changing the tire relationships in the industry, we did spend a lot of time with owners, with Goodyear and trying to look at a model as to what difference it would make. And it's significant. It's several million dollars of difference that makes -- no, in total, in the industry. As we look at the models, now, we'll have to play it out and see for sure. But it's a significant, significant number, enough to make us do this.

BRIAN FRANCE: We think we are, we think we'll hopefully be announcing something as we said by the end of the year, maybe sooner, hopefully going as fast as we can to put the packages together and it's going along nicely. As soon as we get the final information, we'll share it with you.

JIM HUNTER: Thank you very much.

Q&A with NASCAR's Brian France and Mike Helton
October 9, 2005

NASCAR chairman Brian France and NASCAR president Mike Helton held a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with several reporters Saturday morning at Kansas Speedway.

Here are highlights from that session:

BRIAN FRANCE: There are some policy things that we've been contemplating for a while that are probably going to come the pike shortly, things like the Car of Tomorrow, which you know quite a bit about, the multicar team dilemma that we find ourselves in over the super teams and how we think we're going to make some adjustments in policy to balance the playing field a little better and really go after new ownership in the industry, really benefit and help the teams like the Wood Brothers, the Petty's, Cal Wells, independent teams that are finding themselves in ever increasing difficulties to compete.

You're going to see and hear shortly from us - and we've been looking at this for quite some time - some pretty, we think, smart policy that will turn the tide here on that topic.

We also want to talk about the inspection process that we're sometimes criticized in, I guess, and try to get some clarity to what we're trying to get done with that, and any number of things you guys might want to talk about.

Q: So what do you plan to do in terms of the multicar teams issue?

BRIAN FRANCE: We don't like the fact that the independent teams, or in particular a new owner looking at coming in the door, have a daunting task to compete and the concept of having to have five teams or three teams. That's why you haven't seen a lot of new ownership like a Ray Evernham come into the sport.

You see Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman being a lone exception coming in next year. That means the opportunities aren't there for young drivers, it means opportunities aren't there to create the next Rick Hendrick and have that kind of success. It ultimately means that we don't field as many competitive cars as we'd like to field. We're going to have to address that. You're going to see some very clear policy to do that.

One of the things I wanted to say to all you guys is that when you talk to the team owners about this, the car of tomorrow or the inspection process, we come at it from very different views. We actually have very much competing agendas, often. We all agree on safety. Everybody's working (on that) as diligently as they can. But, after that, it's often we're in conflict.

If I'm Jack Roush, I've got five teams in the Chase. Life is great. I've played by the rules. I don't want to see one thing change. I don't want to see the Car of Tomorrow come in. I don't want to see anything about multicar caps or anything we might think about doing. I don't want to see anything changed.

But, our problem is we've got to look out for the future. We've got to look out for the Petty's, the Wood Brothers, Cal Wells and others. We've got to look out for new car owners who want to come into the industry and come into the sport. That's not what Jack Roush is interested in, and I don't blame him. I wouldn't be interested in that either.

When you think about all this stuff and the car of tomorrow, put all these crazy numbers of what it's going to cost the team, that's all an attempt to stall that project. It's not going to get stalled because it's going to do a lot of the things that we all want to see. We all want to see more safety enhancements and this going to allow us to do it. We all want to see a less aerodynamic car out on the track so we can see, and we want to make that envelope a lot narrower in terms of these slicked up cars and all the money they spend to get every little bit out of it. We want to box that thing up, bring it back into the old days where you might have have a slingshot pass, more along the style of racing the trucks have. It's pretty simple. It's not a hard thing to understand.

What was real interesting that I've read and heard, the first thing that we do when we're looking at major policy, we go talk to the industry, often years in advance, depending on how significant it is. And so, the Car of Tomorrow, which we've been working on for two years or longer, we began to have those conversations. As we get clear with what we want to do, we get clearer with them. So, Mike and I, last winter, sat down with every team owner and we asked them 'What's the best way to roll this out?'

They said, 'Well, what you really wouldn't want to do is, in a given year, have half the races on the old chassis and then the car of tomorrow in the other half. That would cost us a lot of money. It's not uncommon for us to rebuild (cars). That's not a significant cost. Sheet metal is not significant. It's not uncommon for us to build eight or 10 cars at the drop of a hat. So that's not an issue, so let us cycle out, give us a good year, year and a half, let us know now, and let us cycle these cars out. Try as best you can to start the new year, if it's 2007 or whenever you're going to roll it out, and have as many events under the new car of tomorrow as you can. So that's exactly what we did. That's exactly what Mike ended up authoring.

There will be some cost but there won't be a lot. It won't be a significant amount to the teams or we wouldn't do it. We wouldn't saddle them with some big, giant cost. That wouldn't be in our best interest. But we want to get all those benefits of the car of tomorrow and we're not going to wait forever to do it. So there's a balance, and we think we've got the right balance.

MIKE HELTON: Just quickly kind of closing the topic of the car of tomorrow. We began this process back in 2000. It made sense for NASCAR taking a clean sheet of paper and building a whole new car from the ground up for several reasons. The primary reason was safety, and still is.

But, if you were going to do that and you couldn't accomplish, and we eventually decided that you could not accomplish the ultimate safe car with the current stuff. We've done a lot things in the current car to make it a lot safer, particularly around the driver's compartment. But, even in doing that, and while the guys have adapted to it, we've certainly shrunk their world. It's more difficult for them to get in and out. It's certainly more difficult for the fire and safety teams to service a driver who might be hurt in the current configuration. So, that plays into it. The crush zones that you get from the nose of the car, the door of the car, some of which you can accomplish, but the maximum amount of current technology that we know that you can take benefit of, you basically have to start over from scratch.

You guys have heard us talk about this future car, next generation and it kind of landed on the term "car of tomorrow" a couple of years ago. So, it's not a new topic and it's one that, like Brian says, it's one we've been in the industry talking about for several years. But now as we get closer to it, and it all kind of comes together, whether you're talking about NASCAR reconsidering and really taking a giant step in figuring out what to do with a car owner and how many cars he should (own) or what's healthy, as well as the competitiveness of the sport, guys like Roush and Hendrick, they've got such big machinery in place, they don't want the box to get smaller.

Jack Roush has absolutely played by the rules. He's done everything correctly. He's done it well, he's done it the most efficient as anybody out there and he's showing signs of success from it. And there's nothing wrong with that. We've got no problem with that. The problem is what the future of the sport is going to look like if that is the trend, if you have to have that kind of level of elites, so to speak, what happens to the rest of our community and who can and cannot get into the sport because of that. That's the only problem we've got with it. We don't care if Jack's got five, six or 10 cars if it were good for the sport. But we don't think it's good for the sport and we have to address that, and that's a big move for us.

The car of tomorrow kind of fits in that to a certain degree, once we get past the point that says the only way we can make a car as safe as we can, and nobody is sitting here saying we can make one that's bulletproof. We may hurt a driver again. We may have a driver die in a race car. But it won't be because we haven't tried not to, and this is the ultimate try not to.

Whether it's SAFER Barrier or the HANS Device, all these things add up. This is kind of the last frontier of closing that last six, eight or 10 percent on making it as 100 percent safe today by today's technologies.

Once you make that decision, what else can you do with this car? Well, you can build a car that recaptures, if you will, the inspection process, that it minimizes, or if not eliminates, the dependency on incredible amounts of engineering and aerodynamics engineering around shifting sheet metal around and what have you, moving rails up and down, all of these things that the megateams have developed. The twisting of the car, the whole gamut of things. That's an opportunity that the Car of Tomorrow presents itself to correct that.

BRIAN FRANCE: It's a bullet now.

MIKE HELTON: And the other thing is, and, oh by the way, it gives us the ability to minimize the dependency on downforce that we've gotten to, particularly at the intermediate tracks, like a 1.5-mile track where there's only one way to get around a race track, that's at the bottom of it. If you don't go there, you don't get around anybody else. And that's all because of downforce, the speed in the corners, the handling, the feel, the comfort level, all that's relative to the aerodynamics of the car, and that's downforce. so, if we can back downforce up, even 20 to 25 years by this new model, without creating a God-awful critter out there that's doing this - which this car isn't - then that's a good thing we think. That's an accomplishment of this car of tomorrow.

Then, when it comes back to the inspection process, this also helps us in that area. What NASCAR is faced with, and we do our inspection process, and we were the first guys to do it, I think most all of them do it now - I don't know about the Formula One guys - but we do it out in the open. Where our garage stalls, everybody parks next to each other. We kind of adapt to Indianapolis because it is what it is. But even our inspection process at Indy is open. There's no barriers, no walls that keeps you from getting in there. They're enclosed but pedestrian walkways, that's the way we do inspections. We do it every weekend that way. We're doing it out here in front of God and everybody right now. And we do that for two reasons. One is to afford to industry to help us in the inspection process. But the biggest reason is is for everybody in the industry, particularly the competitors, to have confidence in that process, that there's no games being played by NASCAR. So that's part of it.

The other major part of it is in the last three or four years we've hired better people, smarter people when it comes to what they know. We've got more engineers on our payroll than I ever thought we'd ever see in our whole lifetime. We're up to I think 13 engineers now working at the R&D Center, trying stay ahead of the game working against the engineers that the industry's got working for them. Aerodynamicists, tire engineers, metallurgist and all these different specialized functions that are in our sport now. We're ramping up to stay with them. We can't stay toe to toe with them, but we're trying to get ahead of the game on that from our perspective.

We've got, this weekend, over 120 officials that cover both series. Tomorrow, just during the Cup race, there will be over 85 inspectors, officials and scoring people out there doing it. You see the numbers of people we've got in our inspection process, before the qualifying, before the race, after the race is over with. We move those around, we train them.

It's mandated now that these inspectors have to go to training courses at the R&D Center in Concord to stay up and be reminded of not just the rules and regulations and what the rulebook says and what the standard interpretation of that rulebook.

It's also a matter of the philosophy of NASCAR. We're here as a service organization to keep the playing field level. That's what our job is. We're human and the people who work for us are human, but we will go to the ultimate degree to keep it that way.

So when the conversations come out of a Dover situation where the shocks caused such a hay-loo here a couple of weeks ago. There was nothing wrong with those shocks. There was nothing with the cars after the race was over in the inspection process as it standardized for everybody else. When the 48 and 5 rolled up on the platform where the height measurements are taken, when they first got on that platform it was in the red. But less than 45 seconds later it was in the green. In our standard procedures, that's OK.

We work as hard to prove a car legal as we do to prove one illegal. Take the same two cars back at Las Vegas. We rolled them up on there and they weren't right. We rolled them off and they aired up the tires and rolled them back up there. They still weren't right. We rolled them back off and checked things up under the car and rolled them back up and they still weren't right. We do that almost every weekend, whether it's the 88 or the 12 or the 2 or the 6 - it doesn't matter. Any car that goes across that platform gets the same. We roll them up and if they're not right we have the air pressures that we put in the tires in the pre-race and we let them put those same pressures back in the tires to try to recreate the pre-race inspection the best we can in post-race. That's common, that's standard procedure.

Under that same standard of operation, in front of everybody that's was around there, those cars rolled up there and had the same opportunity to be right as everybody. And they were right, quite frankly, in less time that it takes most other cars to be right.

Q: Why do you think there has been such a reaction?

MIKE HELTON: Because they got beat.

Some of the quotes I have read, and I assume they're accurate, are from misinformation. Somebody said it took 24 hours for the car to be right. If it took 24 hours that car would have been wrong. We took the 25 car from Hendrick at New Hampshire. We're not bashful, whether it's Felix Sabates or Roger Penske or Richard Childress or Ray Evernham. We don't care. It's a car number to us. We're not going to let the inmates run the prison. That's the way Bill (France) Sr. did it, that's the way Bill France did it and that's what Brian France tells all of us who work in this organization. He says, 'Look, if we go out to dinner or go hang out and do things together away from the race track, that's great because there's a great bunch of people in this sport and we have a lot of fun together. But when we're inside the parameters of this garage area, we don't know them. We're strangers.

What happened at Dover seemed to be a hot topic last week at Talladega. It's died out to some degree, and that's good. But I was there, at the inspection after Dover, because everybody saw the car during the race and it looked funky. I will also tell you that every car that went through the turns at Talladega probably wouldn't have fit our measurements as they were going through the turns. We haven't found an inspector yet who'll run out there and put a template on them in the turns. But there's still a responsibility for the car to be right in inspection. And I was there. I didn't say Dale Jarrett, or Ryan Newman, or Greg Biffle, those guys who everybody has quoted. But they had a right to be there and they could have been there. I was there, and the cars were right. And if they were not right we would not have passed inspection.

Having said that, what we saw we didn't like, what they had figured out on the shocks. When we saw it we said, 'Wait a minute, what caused that?' We took their shocks and we took six other cars' shocks back to Concord to the R&D center to try to figure out what had happened. Once we figured out what happened, the decision was now that they've gotten this sophisticated with building the shocks. They did it within the rules, they did everything right, they did absolutely nothing wrong. Then the question is, 'This is what they accomplished. Do we want to leave it alone and let everybody catch up with them, or do we want to capture it right now and stop it.' We had two concerns. One was safety, because the way these things were being built created so much pressure that it could become dangerous for somebody working on it or somebody having to take if off the car at the race track. The other thing was this was so sophisticated, and quite frankly so complex and so fragile against the rules, that there was a high likelihood that somebody would roll across the platform and shock wouldn't work just right. So they'd be illegal. We'd just as soon not be faced with that if we can avoid it. So we made a decision quickly after Dover. I called Brian and said, 'This isn't right.' He and I have had a lot of conversations about not wanting to change things toward the end of a season whether it's the Chase or not. We'd just as soon not have to change anything. But this was one of those things where we though we needed to capture this one because it was going in the wrong direction. Everything was above-board in Dover, but that's not the direction we need to go. So we issued the bulletin last week to tighten it up – not radically change anything, but tighten it up to get through this season.

Q: From what it sounds like, you're depending a great deal on the car of tomorrow to help you solve some of these problems? You're not going to change the inspection process?

MIKE HELTON: We continuously change inspection procedures. Guys don't like that, and that's why it comes back sometimes that so and so is getting favored. They don't like us changing procedures. One of the reasons we do is we don't want the teams to get complacent with exactly what we're doing. We'll change procedures through '06 before the car of tomorrow gets here. But what we'll be able to do with the car of tomorrow is be able to build the mousetrap now that NASCAR has in more than 50 years of experience watching the development and learned from the things we may have let get too far down the road – the aerodynamics, suspensions, moving the rails and all of those things. We've learned from that, we've captured those things to where NASCAR going down the road can police the sport better so that Richard Childress or Cal Wells or Eddie Wood or anybody don't have to jump through hoops to stay competitive out here more consistently, and don't have to go after enormous money to chase being competitive.

There are some things that will be different in the inspection line that will be different with the car of tomorrow that we've kind of built into the whole process. The templates are the biggest thing. We're working on a 'uni-template,' one big monstrous looking piece of puzzle that just sits down on top of the car, so that we get away from this twisting stuff. We're looking at regulating dimensions in this car that we can now capture in one moment and declare that being as far as they can go without giving them tolerances like we've had to adapt to in the past. The tolerances came over time when one body style wasn't competitive against another. We started building in tolerances that might have been an inch and a half or two inches. That gave the teams the inspiration to chase those two inches to try to figure things out. That's what we've learned, and we can now apply it to this new car and do a better job at the race track helping the teams stay in the box.

BRIAN FRANCE: There are something like 80 templates for all of the cars today. There will be one big template that fits snug and tight, or there might be infrared or digital measurements we could take. We're looking at how we can use technology to be more specific and clear with the teams. If we do it right, and we always say it and we always mean it, the racing ought to get better. More teams should have the opportunity to show their stuff and not be victims of how much money I have. That's going to help us, certainly with new team owners.

Q: So is the current plan to have the car of tomorrow on the track in 2007?

MIKE HELTON: Yes.

Q: Would you phase it in anywhere next year?

MIKE HELTON: That's possible. The only possibility there would be on a plate track so they'd be ready because we'd start 2007 at a plate track and we'd just as soon not start off a new year with the new car.

Q: So if you run at say, second Talladega next year, the plan would be to run it in as many races as possible in 2007?

MIKE HELTON: That's what we're trying to work through right now. In the first go-round with the owners when they understood this was a serious topic and it was really going to happen, we asked what the logical goal was for rolling it out. We're still working through to finalize that.

Q: If you started it at Talladega next fall, then it's in a Chase race.

MIKE HELTON: That was a concern of ours, but the feedback we got from guys in the Chase was that it doesn't matter because they're going to build a new car for Talladega anyway. That's part of the cat and mouse game I don't want to get into putting you guys into the middle. The truth is that in with dialogues with guys in the garage area, they all admit that it's going to at worst cut their fleets by 40 to 60 percent. If a guy has 10 cars then with this new car he could do it with six, at worst, and maybe could do it with four. That comes with taking a clean sheet of paper and us policing the car in a way that it doesn't matter if the car is sitting at Martinsville or Sonoma. It could be competitive. That doesn't stop anybody out there from building 36 cars. But you don't have to. That's the deal that opens some of the barriers of entry where if I want to be a car owner then I am not scared to death when I start looking at coming in.

Q: What's the number you're looking at on limiting car owners to?

BRIAN FRANCE: We haven't arrived at that, but very shortly we're going to be announcing a long-range policy that will speak to that. To a Roush or a Hendrick, who's done everything right who has five cars and might have a sixth on the way, you're going to be impacted more. We're just trying to take everything into consideration. It would be some number much lower than five. It will be a cap. I am sure some might think about that, but we think we've worked through that and have a policy that works.

Q: What it be grandfathered in?

BRIAN FRANCE: There will be a phase-in period. It won't happen tomorrow. But it would phase down from five to four to some other number.

Q: Would this apply only to the Cup level?

BRIAN FRANCE: Only the Cup level now, but we're looking at the trends in the Busch Series and who the owners are.

MIKE HELTON: The cap would be on a per series level and not across all of NASCAR. If you look at all of the things we've done in an effort to minimize the impact of the mega teams - the gear rule, the single engine rule, the impound procedures, capturing testing in a way that minimizes the disparity between the mega teams in the other teams - that's whole a part of the picture. There have been some successes. The gear rule has captured the aggressive of chasing RPMs that had already crossed the 10,000 barrier and were going after 11,000. The gear rule has backed that down to the low 9,000 range and there's no reason to chase 11,000 because it won't do them any good.

Those are things NASCAR has done that gets lost in the shuffle. This is the first year of the impound rule and it's a reaction to watching almost two seasons go on - a qualifying season and racing season. You saw all the work that went on after qualifying and the specialized oil and all of that. The car was basically rebuilt before it was raced, and now you qualify what you race and you've gotten rid of all the snake oil stuff.

Q: Why the strong reaction to the car of tomorrow?

MIKE HELTON: I think the fact it's a chance is a lot of it. Go back to when we first introduced the Chase and there was a groundswell against it because it was a change. The way we did it wasn't broken, what change it? We looked to elevate the sport. Now you're talking about the mechanical side of the sport and teams have geared up and become so sophisticated in their own organizations to the point we feel like it's hurting the future of the sport.

Q: What would you say to the complaints that this will create the kind of car that's in the International Race of Champions vein, too similar that it limits creativity in teams working on their cars?

BRIAN FRANCE: I think that's good. We want it to be the best drivers and teams on the track. We don't want engineers winning races. I think it's great if they're complaining about it. It's drivers, who's got best team chemistry, who makes the calls on the race, when to pit, all the strategies. That's the biggest determining factor. There's always an engineering side, but if we can diminish that, we're all for that. If you want to be in a technology contest, we're not the place for you anyway. We want competitive, side-by-side, the best racing in world. The Formula One and other series rightfully say they're the technology people. That's true. We don't want to be.

Q: But won't you have 43 boxes that all look the same on the track?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, the good news on that is that the cars being made, if you look at them, the manufacturers are going to a boxier car. We're getting lucky on that. Even the Toyotas, the Camry, the Avalon, Cadillac, especially the Chrysler, everyone is coming with more boxier car.

We can't have it both ways and have all cars assembled and look just like showroom and have competitive balance to be as fair as we need. We've had to blend that line, and that's unfortunate for the manufacturers a little bit.

MIKE HELTON: Unless you put this car out here today against the car of tomorrow, you won't be able to tell the difference. You'd have to put it side by side, and then you'd see windshield standing up more and the greenhouse differences. If you put five or six of the cars of tomorrow on the track painted up, you couldn't tell the difference from the grandstand. There will be enough grille differences, headlight differences and tail light differences where it's not going to be that far removed from car out here.

We'll maintain enough of that identity on the car of tomorrow, just like these cars.

Q: Would the limits on multicar teams be in place by next year?

BRIAN FRANCE: We haven't decided that, but we're telling you that it's a thoughtful policy that we've been working on for a long while, and it will have some version of hard cap. There will be some phasing to begin switching the whole idea that you have to be a super team to win. That's where we're at.

Q: Aren't deals like the Roush-Yates engine operation a barrier to people getting into the sport, because if you want to be a Ford team right now that's the only place you can get Ford engines?

BRIAN FRANCE: It's not helpful. Any of those kinds of things serve as a barrier to entry. We don't want to have one place to get the greatest engine in the world. When we see that, we don't like that. Sometimes it takes a while to make an adjustment or change direction, but we fundamentally don't like that.

It's like with the gear rule, we didn't like that they were going to Asia and all over the world to find exotic metals to chase 11,000 RPM. We're not saying we can solve every problem, we're not that smart. But philosophically we have a very clear view of what we're trying to get done. We will do our best to narrow those gaps, take down barriers to entry and put things more in hands of best teams, best drivers, not the best wallets and best engineering. That's our goal.

If you think about single car team, there's testing, sharing of information advantages if you're not part of a super-team with development of drivers, crew chiefs. Those things work against small independent team. Without debate you can ramp up faster if you're associated with Joe Gibbs as opposed to going out by yourself, and there will always be some of that.

When we announced the gear rule, and no one knows this, overnight we got calls from engine builders that at one time were revered engine builders pushed out by this Roush-Yates conglomerate that could only build something chasing 11,000 RPM with all of these exotic metals. We got calls from them saying maybe we can get back in the game now. It'll take a little time for someone to run a Ford and say it's as good as Roush-Yates engine. That brings costs down. When you have one single supplier, the costs go up. We open up more suppliers, bring costs more in line for new team coming in.

Q: Are they any thoughts about changing the format of the Chase?

BRIAN FRANCE: We've always said we want to let it play out. At one point last year, you say Kurt Busch is going to win by a lot and this could be worse than the old days. But things worked out differently. It was very close. We have to let it play out. If we make changes, they will be slight adjustments.

One thing about the winning concept, you have to win at the right time, to play well at right time. In other sports, you can have a lot of wins, but if you don't win in the playoffs, you're out. ... You have to be the best team at the right team. We're not that hung up on it. Jeff Gordon won three races earlier this year, but they're not running well enough to be best team in fall. If we just went on wins, that wouldn't serve our purpose. You have to win and compete at high level when it counts. Right now, you're seeing eight to 10 of the Chase teams running up front each week. That's what we want. They were the best when it counted and continue to be the best.

Q: What happens if Rusty Wallace wins the championship but doesn't win a race?

BRIAN FRANCE: We'd love to see him win a race if he's the champion, but that wouldn't be end of world. For a guy to run in top five, that's almost like a win relative to other sports with 43 teams out there any given Sunday. In any other sport, you've got a 50-50 chance and it's even. You can see the weight we've put on winning is plenty of putting incentive. We've added some points. We may add a little more to put premium on winning.

Q: Where do you stand on the television negotiations?

BRIAN FRANCE: We're coming close, we're getting down to the wire. We look to be, in the next four to six weeks or sooner, able to make some firm announcements of where we'll land.

Q: What's the marketplace like out there for that?

BRIAN FRANCE: It's competitive, but it past three or four weeks, we've been very surprised at all the interest in from the networks to cable. We think we'll come out just fine financially, it's now about making the right deal with the right partners. As for the economics, we're very convinced that we'll get proper value.

We're more concerned about getting the right partner. We've got great ones now and want to make sure whatever happens we get partners who treat us like current partners do, who treat the first and second halves like a franchise sport.

The nature of the package may change, things may look a little different.

The good thing about the Busch Series is that the ratings are up, and it's been quietly doing NBA-like numbers and it's wearing out other sports. It'll never be the Cup series, but we'd like for the new agreement for that to be a franchise of its own and be treated with promotion, and its own announcers to differentiate that series as we go down the road a little better. That has been a lot of interest in that division, quite frankly.

Q: Would it be better to have a single network carrying the whole season?

BRIAN FRANCE: Some of the networks think so. You want continuity, but you also want powerhouse of TimeWarner so you're on CNN and they're promoting you to high heavens. You like that. But you also like NBC, you like the 90-million home factor, prime time gives you promotion.

We won't ever go back to the old days of being chopped up. We're looking for a cohesive package.

Q: Are you looking at giving the Busch Series the same kind of "home" the Truck Series has on Speed?

BRIAN FRANCE: The trucks are differentiated. They have own announcers and graphics, their own look. We'd like the Busch Series to have that, to have their own magazine shows during the week and give it the identity they deserve.

Q: Has there been any decision on whether to not give Cup drivers points for Busch races next year as was once discussed?

MIKE HELTON: We have financial plans in the Busch Series that exclude the top 35 in points, and we may be tweaking those around. But we're not going down the road yet where a Cup driver can't get points in the Busch Series.

NASCAR: Team cap not intended to punish
Four-car teams will be allowed to field part-time programs
By Mark Spoor, NASCAR.COM
November 11, 2005

AVONDALE, Ariz. -- If you don't understand NASCAR new policy limiting the number of teams an owner can possess, don't worry. Jack Roush doesn't understand it, either.

"There are no details," said Roush. "It has the feel that we're going to make it up as we go. The WWF has their ways of determining who is going to win and what the ranking is and maybe NASCAR behind the scenes is trying to do the same thing."

In 2006, team owners would be limited to four Nextel Cup Series teams per organization. On Friday, NASCAR CEO Brian France said that doesn't mean that multicar teams aren't crucial to NASCAR's continued success. However, there has to be a limit to ensure the future of the sport.

"Down the road, several years from now, if we didn't do anything, you very well could have a situation where it's six, seven or more teams that are under a common ownership. While there's points of that they may not feel wrong, the barrier to a new car owner who's coming in is a daunting task to say, 'I've got to own how many teams to be competitive? Is it five? Is it six?'

"While we want a cap and we want to go in that direction, we don't want to put such a moat around the teams that they can't help assist us bring new owners into the sport. That's why it's kind of a work in progress."

For example, a team with four cars -- such as Hendrick Motorsports -- will be able to run a fifth team under a limited schedule. NASCAR President Mike Helton defined such a situation as one that is "getting a rookie ready for the following season, with a limited number of races attached to it."

Teams will also be free to be suppliers to other teams, such as engine deals that the bigger teams have with its smaller teams today.

Also, Roush Racing is going to be grandfathered in to this rule change, only being forced to go to four teams at an undetermined point, in the future. Currently, Roush has sponsor commitments for all its teams that run until at least 2008.

Still, Roush takes the rule change very personally.

"The thing they did by picking on five rather than four is they singled me out," Roush said. "I'm the only guy with five viable teams and the worst of all scenarios is we put all five of them in the Chase and, of course, that gave the bonus to our sponsors for the exposure that they got for being involved with us rather than somebody else and they want to diminish it to some extent.

"I take it personally. I do take it personally," said Roush.

France said he understands Roush's anger, but says this change was not directed at Roush's team.

"I can understand that," said France. "He is the only owner with five teams, so it's very understandable to think that he's disappointed.

"It's not focused on Jack Roush, because Jack Roush hasn't done anything wrong. He just happens to be the guy that has five and he stands out.

"We're looking at a policy for the whole sport, not just one team owner."

Meanwhile, Roush doesn't believe NASCAR is done suppressing owners.

"They've told me it's four," Roush said. "But they haven't said that they would never, never, never consider anything less because you could start that slide and then you could say, 'Well, it's got to be one team, one owner.'

France didn't shut the door on that concept Friday.

"We felt like four was the number that fit our short-term issues without trying to penalize too far what the owners who have multicar teams have done," he said. "They've played by the rules. They've competed fairly. They haven't done one thing in the wrong direction.

"We have considered three. We'll look down the road at if four is the right number. We feel like we're comfortable with that. If down the road, we think it may be different, we'll look at it."

While Roush is certainly beyond angry over this change, he also knows he, his sponsors and his drivers want to stay in the sport.

"I'm not sure what they're trying to do is legally right or is defensible in a court of law," said Roush. "But I want to be in this business. I don't want to jeopardize my sponsors and my drivers and our prospects in the near term.

"I choose not to fight right now, at least not when (the cap) is at four," he said. "You get an animal cornered, he can be a pretty meek animal, but he'll fight pretty hard when he's in a corner. I think that through this they really didn't want to corner us.

"Even though it was about Roush and it was about Mark Martin and it was about Matt Kenseth and it was about Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle -- that even though it was about all of that, they don't want to put us out of business."

---

NASCAR sets cap on cars at four, five-car Roush team has until '09 to comply
By Jenna Fryer
AP Motorsports Writer
November 10, 2005

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Big-money teams will be allowed to field only four cars under a cap limit set by NASCAR on Thursday, a move that infuriated the five-car Roush Racing organization.

The limit goes into effect next season, but NASCAR said it would work to set a timeline for compliance for teams with more than four entries. Jack Roush is the only owner with five teams, all of which are in the 10-man Chase for the championship that crowns the Nextel Cup champion.

``It is hard for Jack not to believe that there is a laser bulls-eye on his forehead,'' Roush Racing president Geoff Smith said.

The move had been expected since last month, when NASCAR chairman Brian France said he was looking to limit the amount of cars one owner can have. The announcement caught Roush by surprise, and his organization has complained it was being singled out.

Until Thursday's announcement, no one was certain what the cap would be.

Smith said Roush officials were told in a recent private meeting with NASCAR that a ``grandfather clause'' would be included to allow them to keep their five teams at least through the 2009 season. All of their current contracts with sponsors and drivers at least run through then, but what happens when those deals expire remains somewhat murky.

``Our impression is if every one of those sponsors wants to continue past '09, they can,'' Smith said. ``If some of the sponsors don't want to continue on but every driver wants to continue past '09, that would be OK, too. But its very unlikely that all of that will happen.

``But the bottom line is we will have to go to four. It won't be next year, it won't be for a few years, but we will have to get there.''

NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter did not immediately return a call for comment to address Smith's interpretation of the grandfather clause.

The top teams in NASCAR are currently multi-car operations with budgets that could be soon closing in on $100 million a year. It's nearly impossible for single-car teams to compete against the big-money groups, which pool resources to gain additional tests, information sharing, multiple sponsorships, and, sometimes, on-track cooperation among teammates.

But in arguing for the cap, France said the big teams are an obstacle to owners contemplating coming into the sport.

``We don't like the fact that the independent teams, or in particular a new owner looking at coming in the door, have a daunting task to compete, and the concept of having to have five teams, three teams,'' France said. ``That means the opportunities aren't there for young drivers. It means opportunities aren't there to create the next Rick Hendrick and have the success.

``It ultimately means that we don't field as many competitive cars as we'd like to field.''

The numbers back France up.

-- Roush has won the past two championships with Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch and he got all five of his drivers into the Chase.

-- Hendrick has a four-man team that includes Jimmie Johnson, who is second in the points with two races remaining, and four-time series champion Jeff Gordon, the winningest driver outside the Chase with four victories.

-- Combined, Roush and Hendrick drivers have won 23 of 33 races this season.

-- All 10 drivers in the Chase are from multi-car teams.

-- At 21st in the standings, Ricky Rudd is the highest ranked driver from a single-car team.

Not all multi-car team owners disliked the cap.

``I think it will be good for the sport,'' Richard Childress, who fields three teams, said in the NASCAR release. ``Personally, I could never have gotten into the sport -- the way it is today -- like I did when I got in as a driver-car owner many years ago.''

And single-car owners have long been in favor of a cap.

``As it relates to me personally, I'm in favor of it. As it relates to making this a better sport, I'm in favor of it,'' said Cal Wells, owner of PPI Motorsports, which fields a car for Bobby Hamilton Jr. ``I think it's going to be very good for the garage area, very good for the sponsors, very good for NASCAR.

``What if Jack had all 43 cars? I know that's probably an extreme, but where does it stop? Five cars? Seven? Ten? Twelve?''

In other rule changes announced for next season, NASCAR said it was limiting the number of tests a team can participate in and a tire-leasing program.

NASCAR will set a schedule for on-track tests, and those will be the only tests at tracks which host Nextel Cup races. There will be six test locations: Lowe's Motor Speedway, Daytona International Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Richmond International Raceway, Homestead-Miami Speedway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Tests at non-Nextel Cup tracks will continue to be permitted.

NASCAR did not reveal any details about its tire-leasing program.

---

Sports Focus: NASCAR's Team Cap
How to police the policy? 'Toothpaste's already out of the tube;' owners look for answers
By Jill Erwin - Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
October 14, 2005

CONCORD, N.C. Now that the initial shock has worn off from NASCAR's announcement of a cap on multicar teams, one question has moved to the forefront.

How does NASCAR plan to police it?

No details about the plan have been released, even the maximum number of teams per owner. That has led to plenty of speculation and opinions, but little in terms of preparation.

Eddie Wood, however, said "the toothpaste's already out of the tube" and he has no idea how the governing body will be able to implement the change.

"I don't know how you can roll back the clock and do anything about it. I just don't know," said Wood, the co-owner of the No. 21 Ford. "I don't know what they're going to do."

Ricky Rudd, who qualified 31st for tomorrow's UAW-GM Quality 500 at Lowe's Motor Speedway, said he's willing to keep an open mind.

Rudd, whose contract with Wood Brothers is up after this year, said he hopes NASCAR is serious about it.

"I don't know if it's a PR statement or a real intention to try to limit it," Rudd said. "I'll be honest, I don't know how you do it. Hendrick's group, used to be, one was owned by Papa Joe, one by Jeff and it was just more or less a paper shuffle.

"I'd like to see their plan. I think it would make the sport a lot healthier when you don't just have two or three cars controlling the whole sport. Again, I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but I just want to see how they're going to be able to control that."

Roush Racing also takes advantage of that "paper shuffle." Jack Roush is listed as the owner of Carl Edwards and Mark Martin's cars, Greg Biffle's is listed as being owned by team President Geoff Smith, Matt Kenseth's is owned by Martin and Kurt Busch's car is owned by Georgetta Roush, Jack's mother.

Biffle, third in points and one of five Roush drivers in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, said changing the names on the ownership papers won't necessarily change the way things are done.

The Roush drivers are split between two different buildings, but they share information. Biffle says splitting up teams doesn't ensure drivers and crews still won't do that.

When asked if he was talking about "insider trading" of sorts, Biffle explained.

"We could provide, and I'll just pick someone out of the blue. We could provide Evernham - we have no ownership, no alliance, no anything - we could provide them with every bit of information that we gather," Biffle said. "Obviously, we wouldn't do that, but what difference is it going to make?"

There was some talk after the announcement about it possibly bringing about franchising for NASCAR. Rudd was quick to dismiss that talk.

"I just don't see NASCAR giving up that control. I really don't," Rudd said. "It seems like it gets talked about every three, four, five years. It's all about control, and I just don't see NASCAR giving that up."

Wood said he didn't feel comfortable talking much about the rule since he hadn't heard anything definite about it.

He did, however, compare it to the Chase in terms of initial backlash, and said he has every faith that NASCAR knows exactly what it's doing.

"I know them well enough that usually at the end of the day, when it's all said and done, whatever they have in mind usually works in some way, shape or form," Wood said. "Just because I don't know the answer, I'm sure they have one."

Contact Jill Erwin at (804) 649-6490 or jerwin@timesdispatch.com

---

NASCAR proposal has flaws
Plan to limit number of teams in Cup series would unfairly penalize owners such as Roush.
By Angelique S. Chengelis / The Detroit News
October 14, 2005

Q. NASCAR intends to reduce the number of teams an owner can field the next few years. So that means someone such as Livonia-based Jack Roush will have to slash his team from five to probably three. Is this fair?

A: No, no, no. NASCAR said it wants to even the playing field and attract new ownership. That is a noble idea. NASCAR says the success of bigger teams, like Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports (four drivers), repels potential new owners from trying to break into the sport.

That's fine, but what about the Jack Roushes of the world, who started small and built their multi-car teams with hard work? Why should they be penalized for building a multi-car team under limitless guidelines?

Q: So what do you suggest?

A: If NASCAR wants to impose limits, it should do so for those owners who currently are not over the limit.

Those teams have commitments to sponsors -- sponsors that, perhaps, might not enter the series with any other owner. To penalize a Roush or a Hendrick because they have too much is ridiculous.

Enforce the policy, but don't penalize teams that already are established.

Q: Do you like the Chase for the Championship format?

A: Not really. It does seem like all the attention is focused on the 10 drivers eligible to win the big prize, while the rest of the field is virtually ignored. That's not good.

What was so wrong with the old format? Was it that bad? So what if a driver runs away with the title? He earned it.

Q: Oh, no. Second thoughts for Rusty Wallace, too?

A: Apparently. Wallace, 49, said last weekend he doesn't want to box himself in, that if he finds he can't live without racing after the season-finale this year and the Daytona 500 next February, he could still do a race here and there.

That seems reasonable. Terry Labonte and Bill Elliott have competed in occasional Cup races.

Wallace wants to work with his son, Steve, who will compete in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck series next season, along with some Busch races.

Hopefully, the elder Wallace will stick with his plans and bow out gracefully.

Reach Angelique S. Chengelis at angelique.chengelis@detnews.com.

---

NASCAR appears headed toward limiting the number of teams per owner WHICH WAY?
By Mike Mulhern - Winston Salem Journal Reporter
October 14, 2005

Cal Wells has been on the NASCAR scene almost six years, and the stock-car world has changed considerably since he showed up with enough engineers and computers to scare everyone.

Now, he's just trying to keep his head above water or at least hold his own, when by all rights he should be thriving, with his technical background and experience.

But Wells has fallen steadily behind the past couple of years, steamrolled by the unbridled technology that has become such an integral part of NASCAR.

With each new rules change, even each minor tweak, the bigger multi-car teams gain advantages through their armies of mechanics.

Wells says he is naturally in favor of NASCAR's new plans to curb the size - if not the power - of the sport's "super-teams," as CEO Brian France describes them. But he's not quite sure how that will play out, or how long it might take.

Wells figures that even if NASCAR manages to establish a limit of three teams for each car owner, which he deems the goal, it may take three to five years to get to that point. Even then, Wells would have to add two teams to reach parity. So far, Wells' plans for a two-car operation have been more wishful thinking, given corporate preference to invest their sponsorship dollars in established winning teams.

If France is to turn things around, he must do two things first: persuade enough big sponsoring corporations to move to some of the smaller operations, and get a better handle on the technology.

However, this problem doesn't exist in a vacuum - Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler are facing formidable threats in NASCAR from the Japanese, and France must figure out a way to balance the two issues: car maker vs. car maker, as well as team owner vs. team owner.

Still, Wells says that NASCAR is headed in the right direction.

"From the end of the garage I'm at, naturally I would embrace (a cap on team ownership)," Wells said. "In any team-oriented sport like this, the ownership side obviously needs to be scrutinized. Right now, one guy could own the entire garage. And could you see five or six car owners controlling the entire garage? I think you could.

"So if NASCAR wants 43 owners, great. If they want 22 owners with two cars each, great.

"There is no question that Jack Roush has an earned advantage today. He has earned every bit of it. He hasn't stolen drivers or sponsors or people. The sponsors are new sponsors he's brought in. The group he's got has been created through personal investment, hard work, and blood, sweat and tears.

"However, that being said, I don't believe it should be just his playground. Others should be able to come compete."

Wells notes the Chase for the Championship when he makes his case for an ownership cap.

"Look at this new championship format," Wells said. "(Roush) has five teams, half, stacked, and that makes it very plausible he will win the thing. And it makes the opportunity for other challenges, whether it be team tactics, and I'm not saying that's happening, but it creates something that may not provide an upside for NASCAR.

"The optimal would be 10 car owners with one car each, or at least five car owners with two cars each. But this year, with five like that, I just don't think it's healthy."

Wells concedes that he has no "right" to be in the NASCAR garage.

"But as the momentum migrates toward multi-car teams bigger than three, the challenges - the pay plans, the testing rules, the coordination between teammates, and the manufacturer - are a hill I'm not strong enough to overcome," he said. "When you look at what kind of controls that can be established here, it's (NASCAR's) ball field. And they should have the type of playground they want."

And NASCAR racing, some would say, is not a true sport, but rather a private family-owned entertainment business.

How to change the ownership rules?

"I'm not a legal expert ... but I can tell you I believe in my heart that NASCAR's desire is to see parity throughout the garage," Wells said. "I think they want to see a David slay Goliath once a decade. They want to keep multiplicity in the garage, instead of it being in just a few owners' hands.

"I think they believe in 'one team, one owner, let's go.'

"In the perfect (NASCAR) environment, I'd say a limit of two teams per owner. A more realistic limit would be three. And I'd look at three to five years. You certainly wouldn't want to just flip a switch."

The issue of franchising is now being raised, which would be a fundamental change from NASCAR's long-time legal concept of independent contractors. Wells says it would be unfair for him to discuss that: "It would be too selfish of me to address that, because it would obviously be in my best interests."

However Wells says, "I've had the good fortune to be asked my opinion on the whole concept of multi-car teams, since the moment I walked in the garage five years ago. So I'm surprised at Jack's comments (that he was blindsided), because this has been a topic for quite some time. Gosh, everything I've heard is that he has been consulted extensively. Now he may not agree - but I don't think he's an ostrich.

"Jack has earned everything he's got in here, as has Rick Hendrick. And I have immense respect for that. But when you look at the competitive environment for sponsorship, for drivers, for the crew members, the hill becomes steeper and steeper every year.

Is NASCAR heading toward more centralized control of the sport, which is traditionally viewed as a confederation of independent contractors?

"I don't think so," Wells said. "I don't think they're trying to control anything outside the garage area. They're just trying to say how many transporters you can bring in - but it's true they've never done that before.

"I wasn't exiled here. Neither was Mr. Roush. We want to be here. And we need to flow with the changes."

Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com

---

Roush eyeing more TV money
By Mike Mulhern - Winston Salem Journal Reporter
October 14, 2005

CONCORD - Jack Roush, in his first major response to Brian France's plan to limit the number of stock-car teams anyone may own, said NASCAR executives have now opened the door to discussions about providing Nextel Cup team owners with a more equitable share of the sport's $2.4 billion in television revenues.

Meanwhile, fallout from France's Kansas bombshell continues. Roush said he and fellow car owners, including Rick Hendrick, were stunned at France's announcement that Roush, with five teams in the championship race, and Hendrick, with four, will have to cut back to either three or two teams, probably over the next three years.

"When any business in the United States gets a threat about survival and/or viability, there is remedy and review," Roush said yesterday. "I hope we don't go down a path of bringing oversight into this sport that would break convention and the closeness and the unsophistication of the business relationships between the teams and the sanctioning bodies that they've been carried on the last 60 years.

"But all things must pass, I guess, so we'll see.

"The NASCAR sport appears to be a very good business. There is a lot of revenue, and it has been very good for the track owners and very good for NASCAR. But it has not historically been very good for the team owners.

"This is a marginally satisfactory business (for Roush) from a return on investment; certainly not better than the other things I've got going, in spite of this current success. I've been racing 40 years, and I've had decades when we have not been profitable in our racing - and more than one decade since I've been in NASCAR.

"We've been asked, in the light of what Brian said, to have a discussion in the very near future - a discussion we should have had before he said anything - about NASCAR's concerns about the owners, and where they're coming from, and how they languish and prosper."

Roush said he may propose to NASCAR "income-revenue sharing" with owners by giving them "a substantial piece of the TV" money and "a piece of the gate."

Such talks come at an opportune time, since France is negotiating contracts with Fox, NBC and TimeWarner's Turner Network, and possibly with Disney-owned ABC-ESPN.

NASCAR and its track owners (principally the France family and Bruton Smith) now take 75 percent of the annual $400 million from TV, while the tour's 40-some team owners share the other $100 million, under a secret formula owners have been warned not to discuss publicly.

France, at Kansas, took aim squarely at Roush: "If I'm Jack Roush, I've got five teams in the chase. Life is great. I've played by the rules. I don't want to see one thing change. I don't want to see the car of tomorrow, I don't want to see anything about multi-car caps, I don't want to see anything changed.

"But our problem is we've got to look out for the future. We've got to look out for new car owners who want to come into the sport. That's not what Jack Roush is interested in, and I don't blame him. I wouldn't be interested in that either."

Might France's plans for curbing owners be based on worries about owners teaming up on issues, such as the hotly disputed car of the future?

"If there was a concern about having the owners cooperating, you couldn't have created a better scenario for it than this threatened annihilation, because that has given us a common problem," Roush said.

Roush said NASCAR's long-time business model of dealing with team owners as "independent contractors" might not be the best way to run the sport.

Roush told the Journal he would be willing to sell his teams to NASCAR - as part of a new business model for the sport - in exchange for a guaranteed return on investment: "Like the consolidation (last month) of the souvenir business by ISC (the France family's International Speedway Corp.) and SMI (Bruton Smith's company), you could form a business that owns all the race teams. And I would be inclined to fold my teams and my equity in this thing into a consortium that would be controlled by NASCAR if they like, that would have guarantees for revenue sharing and return on investment.

"But for somebody to come to me and say, 'We want you to give this up, so we can have outsider XYZ come in on the same level you're operating at,' I don't think that is going to be defensible. And I don't think it is required, and I don't think, in the light of day, there will be enough support for that to go forward."

Elliott Sadler and Ryan Newman took the front row last night for Saturday night's UAW-GM Quality 500, both with laps over 193. Jimmie Johnson qualified third but will start at the rear because he blew an engine in practice. "A lot of cars have hit the wall, so we don't know how many more may have to go to the rear for the start," Newman said.

---

NASCAR wants parity in its future
By James Hart - The Morning Call
October 13, 2005

Brian France's strategy to compete with the big three sports leagues is simple — copy everything the NFL does.

Under France's watch, NASCAR has (take a deep breath) adopted a playoff system, opened offices in New York and L.A., installed an overtime period (when necessary), is negotiating a second multibillion-dollar television contract and, via his latest announcement, is about to implement a salary cap, if you will, into a sport where skyrocketing costs are putting a divide between the haves and have nots.

''We've got to look out for the future,'' France told a group of reporters last weekend at Kansas Motor Speedway, where he floated an idea that would limit the number of cars one team owner could field. ''We've got to look out for [smaller teams like] the Pettys, the Wood Brothers, Cal Wells and others. We've got to look out for new car owners who want to come into the industry and come into the sport.''

France might as well have been NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, talking about the Green Bays, the Tampas, the Tennessees and others — small markets with big NFL success.

The NFL figured out long ago that parity is a good thing for everyone involved; that keeping fans hopeful means keeping fans interested, and so the owners implemented revenue sharing.

NASCAR had this figured out, too. Tight racing not only ensures good finishes, but wrecks, and everyone loves a good wreck, and so NASCAR allows itself the freedom to tweak the rules on a weekly basis to make sure no one gains a distinct advantage.

But owners found a way around this. Multicar garages afforded them the testing they needed to gain a tenth of a second here, a tenth there, all of which add up in a 500-mile race. At the forefront of this was Jack Roush, who, by 1998, had himself a five-car team.

Within two years, multicar teams dominated the sport, winning 33 of 34 races — a seismic shift from even a few years earlier when, in '95, single-car teams won 15 of 31 races. Since 2001, only one single-car team has found its way to Victory Lane.

In the last two years, a gap has opened between even the multicar teams. Between them, Roush and Hendrick Motorsports, the two wealthiest teams in NASCAR, won 21 of 36 races last year, and this year three teams — Roush, Hendrick and Joe Gibbs Racing — have combined to win 24 of 30 races, much to NASCAR's chagrin.

''We don't want engineers winning races,'' France said. ''It's drivers — who's got best team chemistry, who makes the calls on the race, when to pit, all the strategies? That's the biggest determining factor.

''If you want to be in a technology contest, we're not the place for you anyway,'' he continued. ''We want competitive, side-by-side, the best racing in world. The Formula One and other series rightfully say they're the technology people. That's true. We don't want to be.''

Technology on a racetrack is what money is to a baseball diamond, and NASCAR considers Roush its George Steinbrenner. So when France says he's looking out for the Pettys, the Wood Brothers and Cal Wells, what he's really saying is he doesn't want to end up with a bunch of Kansas City Royals/Tampa Bay Devil Rays/Colorado Rockies and only a few New York Yankees.

The trouble France is going to have is with implementing his own policy. If the cap is put at three cars, how does Roush fire two drivers who are already under contract? What about sponsors who have deals in place contingent on drivers and owners? And once they get this sorted out, what's to keep teams from sharing information and technology, as some do already?

''I see their concern with the multicar teams, but I don't know how you're going to stop it,'' said Matt Kenseth, one of Roush's five drivers.

Considering its track record as, in Richard Petty's words, a benevolent dictatorship, NASCAR will find a way to get it done. They issue the licenses to drive every week, and if Roush or Hendrick or anyone else doesn't want to comply with NASCAR's rules, then they can find somewhere else to race, because just like the NFL, the sport isn't about superstars, it's about the competition.

james.hart@mcall.com
610-820-6133

---

Tempers rising inside and out at Roush Racing
By Mark Decotis
floridatoday.com
October 11, 2005

Imagine what would be brewing had Jack Roush's cars not finished 1-2-3 in Sunday's Nextel Cup show at Kansas and Roush not had four of the top five finishers overall.

Because right now, there is discord within the Roush ranks and Roush and his minions are ticked off at NASCAR, which in itself is nothing new.

Where do we start? How about at the top?

Roush driver and 2004 Cup champion Kurt Busch is steamed at teammate and 2003 champion Matt Kenseth because Kenseth would not let him lead a lap and thus gain five bonus points that he desperately needs seeing he's 10th, 224 markers behind leader Tony Stewart.

Kenseth made it pretty clear on his radio, monitored during NBC's broadcast, that he was not going to give away five points to anyone, given the tightness of the playoff.

Kenseth, based on his fifth-place finish on Sunday, is eighth in points, 116 behind Stewart, and surely is well aware that last season's championship was decided in Busch's favor by eight markers over second-place Jimmie Johnson.

Busch obviously is aware of the same fact and cognizant for sure of the sham perpetrated several times this season where Roush drivers allowed teammates to lead a lap to gain the bonus.

Why Sunday should be any different escapes Busch and it has to rankle him that Roush, in Mark Martin's post-race winner's interview Sunday, disavowed any intent on his or anyone else's part to let his drivers swap the lead so they could gain points.

Where was he at California?

But perhaps Roush's amnesia can be forgiven given that he and team president Geoff Smith are angry at NASCAR over a proposal floated by boss Brian France to limit the number of teams any one individual can own. Couple that with criticism from France about the Roush-Robert Yates engine union and its negative effect on the sport and it's no wonder Roush's back is up.

France's comments are interesting on several fronts. First, how can he criticize what the Ford teams are doing in the face of competition from Chevy, which had 20 cars in Sunday's 43-car field to nine for Ford and 14 for Dodge, and with Toyota, which attacks in nothing short of a united front, looming?

Is Ford just supposed to step aside and let the others scheme and connive and add, multiply and divide and in the process flatten it? I don't see where Roush and Yates have broken any rules -- and NASCAR president Mike Helton acknowledged that -- but then again, do the same rules really apply week to week in NASCAR anyway?

Perhaps, as we had written when it became apparent the sport's two biggest stars, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, and their influential sponsors, Budwesier and DuPont, would miss the playoff, France is taking the heat from the corporate suites and the TV suits. Perhaps in frustration he is steamed that Roush owns five of the 10 teams eligible for the championship.

Imagine how put out he would be had Yates qualified his two teams, giving Roush-Yates seven of 10.

Why is no anger being directed at Hendrick Motorsports which fields the cars of Gordon, playoff participant Jimmie Johnson, top rookie Kyle Busch, Brian Vickers and part-timer Terry Labonte and supplies engines to the MB2/MBV cars of Joe Nemechek and Scott Riggs?

What about Dodge's Ray Evernham, who fields two cars and supplies engines to the two Petty Enterprises teams?

But most perplexing is how NASCAR could pull off telling any owner how many teams he can bring to a race without opening itself up to the teams being anything more than independent contractors and thus inviting things such as unions and fringe benefits, among others?

According to a NASCAR transcript, the boss man was not specific in his methodology when it comes to limiting teams, just his intent.

So perhaps until he supplies the concrete we should just consider this more mush. As for Roush, no matter the consistency of the gruel, pass the antacid.

Contact DeCotis at 242-3786 or mdecotis@flatoday.net

---

France's clandestine comments anger Roush
By Mike Mulhern - Winston Salem Journal Reporter
October 10, 2005

KANSAS CITY, Kan. - With all five of his stock car teams in the title chase, car owner Jack Roush may be the odds-on favorite to win his third straight NASCAR championship.

But that's not setting well with Brian France, NASCAR's president.

France's curious comments Saturday about wanting to prune back stock-car racing "super-teams" like Roush's were the chief topic of conversation in the NASCAR garage yesterday, with the Roush camp taking the words of the NASCAR chief as a direct slap in the face.

Roush was upset and displeased at France's pointed comments, and Geoff Smith, president of Roush Racing, was even more upset.

"It is intellectually incomprehensible to Jack Roush," Smith said, "that after eight years of running five teams, millions of dollars in investment in development drivers so there will be more drivers for the future, and investments so we can have sponsors come in here to support the sport with their millions of dollars, that suddenly in the middle of our success, in the middle of a chase for the championship, there are these oblique and direct comments that we are doing something competitively unfair.

"And when I read the remarks, there are a number of things that don't make any sense to me whatsoever.

"That doesn't mean we have any say in the matter. It's somebody else's sandbox, and we're invited to play in it, under their rules.

"But in the matter of young drivers, who more than Roush Racing has invested in young drivers so they can be ready to have a career here? Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth, Kurt Busch, Todd Kluever. And Robby Gordon is a Roush graduate, too.

"So it's a big puzzle to us. And we wonder if it just became offensive to someone that our five highly-qualified teams happen to beat out the two stars that the fans want to see, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon."

Many media members here were also upset with France, NASCAR president Mike Helton, and NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter for the way the executives handled the France interviews, held clandestinely in a trailer with five handpicked reporters, with the rest of the media specifically excluded.

Hunter, in some contentious moments, denied that the reporters were specially selected by NASCAR for the secret meeting, but two of the reporters involved confirmed they had indeed been told Friday to be prepared for the meeting.

The Journal was not one of the media invited to the session, despite a specific request Friday to Hunter to talk with Helton about many of the issues under debate, including the contentious issues of recent penalties and no-calls. Helton had declined to talk with the Journal at Dover two weeks ago about recent controversies, despite requests; and Helton could not be reached at the NASCAR hauler last weekend in the Talladega garage for talks either.

NASCAR yesterday provided copies of what was apparently a transcript of Saturday's meeting, and a copy of that eight-page document was so far all that Smith and Roush and other reporters had to go on in trying to understand France's new position.

Some of the most contentious points in that transcript:

- France pointedly referring to Roush having five teams in the championship race and saying he plans to put a "hard cap" on the number of teams any one car owner may have;

- France pointing to the Ford-Roush-Robert Yates engine building "conglomerate" as "not helpful" to the sport.

"We've been looking at this for quite some time and have, we think, a smart policy that will turn the tide," France said of his plans to limit what he termed "the super-teams."

Roush has five teams and provides the only available competitive Ford engines; Rick Hendrick owns four teams and provides equipment, engines and engineering advise to several other teams; Chip Ganassi plans to expand from three to four teams next season; Roger Penske has three teams, and reports are he may expand to four in 2007; Teresa Earnhardt will have three teams next season; Richard Childress has three full-time teams and a fourth part-time team; Ray Evernham plans to expand from two to three full-time teams next year; and Joe Gibbs has three teams and will supply major support and equipment to a fourth next year: the new Roger Staubach-Troy Aikman team.

France said more specifics about his plans "are probably going to come down the pike shortly ... how we think we're going to make some adjustments in policy to balance the playing field a little better and really go after new ownership ... and help teams like the Wood brothers, the Pettys, Cal Wells, independent teams that are finding themselves in ever-increasing difficulties to compete."

The Woods' last win came in 2001; Wells has won twice in his years on the tour, last in 2003; the Pettys' last win came in 1999.

France says he wants to see new blood coming into the sport: "....We don't like the fact that the independent teams, or in particular a new owner looking at coming in the door, have a daunting task to compete and have to have five teams or three teams. That's why you haven't seen a lot of new ownership ... come into the sport....

"That means the opportunities aren't there for young drivers.... It ultimately means we don't field as many competitive cars as we'd like to field.

"We're going to have to address that. You're going to see some very clear policy....

"If I'm Jack Roush, I've got five teams in the chase, life is great, I've played by the rules, I don't want to see one thing change.

"But our problem is we've got to look out for the future. We've got to look out for the Pettys, the Wood brothers, Cal Wells and others. We've got to look out for new car owners who want to come into the sport. That's not what Jack Roush is interested in...."

Helton concedes, "Jack Roush has absolutely played by the rules. He's done everything correctly. He's done it well, he's done it the most efficiently of anybody.... and there's nothing wrong with that.

"The problem is what the future of the sport is going to look like if that is the trend, if you have to have that kind of level of elites.

"We don't care if Jack's got five, six or 10 cars, if it were good for the sport. But we don't think it's good for the sport, and we have to address that."

All that just made Roush and Smith sizzle.

"I read the phrase that the Roush-Yates engine program is 'not helpful' and is a 'barrier to entry,'" Smith said. "The fact is, the Roush-Yates engine program is a direct response to the centralized manufacturing process that Toyota put in place under NASCAR's watchful eye. All we're doing is reacting to competition.

"As far as team owners, the barrier to entry has nothing to do with whether there are five teams or not, it has to do with the fact the sport is very expensive to get into and compete, and it's that way whether you've got two teams or five. And there were 49 people trying to qualify here, and they only needed 43. There is plenty of opportunity there.

"The lament about no new owners - here are Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman coming in."

Smith and Roush are trying to put together a new diversity team for NFL star Tim Brown.

There are a number of questions that France and Helton were not asked: What influence might the recent decline in television ratings be playing in all this? Is NBC perhaps upset that the championship race does not include the sport's two biggest stars?

"I don't hear Dale and Jeff lamenting the fact that they didn't earn the right to be in the chase this year," Smith said. "They'll be back strong next year.

"I just wonder if this is an effort to put us into a regressive mode.

"If the stars are the only ones who have money, they will always be in the chase. That's the way it used to be.

"The stars will always have teams with more money than the other teams, and that's a huge barrier to entry right there. If you're Eddie Wood, and you have to compete against Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s income stream, that's an impossible task."

---

My Mark Martin site is in cahoots with my home page PTsgirl Purple Haze.