Theres a great article in the Feb/09 issue of Car and Driver Magazine about start-and-park teams in the Nationwide series ... i suggest picking up the magazine, it makes for very interesting reading material.
last thread abut start and park got hill3 banned, dont think i will touch this one.
Sorry I had to remove the photo's as these are copywrite and belong to Car & Driver. Thanks for sharing.
Hill3 never got banned for this.
I think it is OK for the drivers in NASCAR as I stated before but sort of feel NASCAR is lying to their fans. As said before a lot of fans don't know that NASCAR does this and a lot do.
Do people really care if nascar started 35 instead of 43? Don't get me wrong I don't want to take money away from these racers that make a living doing these races and quit after a few laps.
If NASCAR is allowing them to start knowing they are only going to quit after a few lap. This brings up another question like, does NASCAR do the same teching on these cars or do they get away with things as they only run a couple of laps.
As stated before if every fan knew they used fillers they wouldn't need to do this would they?
This is something we can discuss in or online Video/Audio/Text Chat this Sunday at 8PM EST
Just my 5 cents worth (Inflation drove up my 2 cents worth to 5 cents)
Evan
Happy New Year
With fewer teams with full sponsorship, the start and park teams will be more noticeable in 2009. These types of teams have always existed, but make more races when the full time teams drop in numbers. This S&P phenomenon is cyclical and will fade into the background when the economy strengthens and more teams are full time again. Personally, I'm indifferent towards the start & park teams. If it's a short field and/or you can qualify, why not ?
Do people really care if nascar started 35 instead of 43? Don't get me wrong I don't want to take money away from these racers that make a living doing these races and quit after a few laps.
If NASCAR is allowing them to start knowing they are only going to quit after a few lap. This brings up another question like, does NASCAR do the same teching on these cars or do they get away with things as they only run a couple of laps.
As stated before if every fan knew they used fillers they wouldn't need to do this would they?
Evan
Happy New Year
Nascar has no idea who is going to be a "start-an-park" car from week to week. Every team pays the same fees, registers for the same races, goes through the same tech process, and makes the race through qualifying. They aren't given a free pass to start the race... Therefore Nascar really has no control over this situation, other than to drasticly lower the costs involved. But unfortunately there is no simple fix to that. So its not NASCAR that's using field fillers, its teams like MSRP Motorsports that are using this down time in the economy to try and take advantage of the current situation.
MSRP Motorsports made almost $1.22 Million this past year running 2 cars and only doing 550ish laps all season, and a cost of roughly $10,000 per race, per car .. thats a profit of about $500,000 over the course of the year
One way Nascar can fix this is to change the structure of the purse for each race. With only a couple thousand dollars difference at most between 43rd and 20th, it doesn't give the teams incentive to try and run upfront