NASCAR CEO Brian France takes leave of absence following DUI, drug charges - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.cbssports.com/nascar/news/nascar-ceo-brian-france-takes-leave-of-absence-following-dui-drug-possession-charges/ NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France has taken an indefinite leave of absence following his arrest on Sunday night. France, who was stopped on Long Island, N.Y., where he owns a home, faces charges of aggravated driving while intoxicated and criminal possession of a controlled substance. ... France was reportedly driving a 2017 Lexus and passed through a stop sign. Officers pulled France over and deemed that he was driving the vehicle while intoxicated. Officers reportedly found oxycodone on France during a search. Maybe he'll be replaced by someone actually competent.

Hopefully. Ideally they'd go back to a regular points championship format instead of this playoffs-style format, but that might be too optimistic.

And then he gets replaced by Eddie Gossage and every race of the season gets changed to being at Texas Motor Speedway.

For context for non-viewers, this man nearly single-handedly brought down a sport that at one point was rivaling the NFL in numbers after he inherited the racing body from his ailing father, who had successfully made the sport a national phenomena and had inherited it himself from his own father, the founder of NASCAR. He clearly doesn't like racing and wish he had gotten a different American sport, as he has done the following: -Added a playoff system, which ended up skewing the championships toward one dude -Had names tacked on to the back of car rooves as if they were football attire, and made the cars look blatantly not like stock cars (up to and including having winged spoilers for a few years) -Changed the playoff system no less than 6 times in 14 years, including an elimination system every three races which is blatantly unfair to people caught in accidents -Apparently was inspired by Pixar's Cars, and made it so that the final race in the series has a point reset creating a fabricated 4-way tie. -Simplified the point system, only to add hidden bonus points that no one can consistently follow -Turned races into three segments, which was mostly to find more ways to add commercials and completely ruins the endurance of the sport -Has directly bent the rules of his own sport, including making a 12 man playoff have 13 drivers one year and wavering a driver that missed one third of the year a playoff position, who ended up winning the championship despite being consistently worse than four other drivers over the span he actually did race -Manipulates races with made up caution flags to bunch up racers, which directly affected a championship in favor of the one guy who benefited the most from the playoff format since it formed and made the person who was then the points leader quit the sport out of frustration -Has turned car slots into franchises, which benefits rich teams and hurts poor ones -Reacted to a loss in ticket sales from his decisions by increasing ticket prices -To hide the massive decrease in sales this caused, he had grandstands torn down to force remaining payers together to make them look fuller He is one of the most incompetent businessmen out there and he still gets to be nearly a billionaire because of who he was born to. The sport has lost nearly 70% of it's base, has had a mass exodus of sponsors and can't even manage to have his biggest series have a full field of cars because little teams can't afford to race. The racing is also garbage and unwatchable compared to twenty years ago because the cars have handled like raw garbage for over a decade. tl:;dr how to screw up a golden goose maintainable by doing nothing

Don't know if you just mean moving them to the back or just having the names at all, but I actually kind of liked them when they were on the front of the car, since it made it easier to identify who was who, especially in cases of drivers that frequently change sponsor/paint scheme or cars that aren't driven by the same driver every race. Everything else, though, is spot on.

It's even worse because they bought out the only two stock car series that stood up even slightly to them, and own around had of the tracks they race on outright (with all but one being owned by a single ally), meaning a rival upstart series wouldn't even be allowed on the same tracks if NASCAR considered them a threat and basically requires the "stock car racing" monopoly to outright die before another sanctioning body can succeed.

https://youtu.be/F2BILMQHZ6A This pretty much sums up my opinion of what Nascar has become. I grew up being practically obsessed with this sport, but ever since Brian France took over in 2003 I slowly lost interest with the insane amount of changes he brought to the sport as an effort to appeal to a wider audience. Which failed spectacularly, by the way. First there was the "Chase", which originally took the top 10 drivers in the points with ten races to go and made them the only ones eligible for the cup, along with resetting their points. If you do really well in the first 26 races and get fucked in the last 10, then you lose. Another big problem was that these last 10 races were always on the same tracks every year. If you were good at those tracks you basically had the championship on lock. That's how Jimmie Johnson won 7 fucking championships in the last 12 years. Then there was the "Car of Tomorrow", which added a ton of welcome safety features to the cars...as well as massively changing the look and aerodynamics for the worse. They even changed the blade spoiler (which they've had for like, 50 years) to a fucking wing. A wing that was only removed after a ton of cars flew into the fence because it generated a massive amount of lift going backwards. Which, y'know, happens a lot. Now the whole thing is a joke. They've poisoned the second and third tier series with their chase bullshit, along with making it so that winning the championship literally depends on where you finish in the final race. You can win every single fucking race in the entire season, but if you get wrecked out in the last race you fucking lose. You may as well just roll some fucking dice to determine the winner. They keep fucking with the racing too, not just with their "segmented races" bullshit, but also by throwing the yellow flag for no reason just so a star driver can catch up. It's a total farce. Just look at this: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/19a3b82b-6807-4e37-bd5e-584b11eb109c/image.png Look at all those empty seats. I went to Bristol back in 2004-ish and the place was absolutely packed. Now they've taken to covering up seats at some tracks with tarps so that you can't sit in them just so their attendance numbers don't look so pathetic. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/537dc83c-681f-46bf-bd99-068e030f6df4/image.png

I haven't watched a NASCAR race in years. Seems like I'm not the only one.

I had been a close follower of it in the 90s and 00s and even participated in online leagues for racing simulators where you'd have endurance races for 2-4 hours on end using steering wheels, but I quit watching in 2009 because I couldn't stomach how bad it had gotten by that point and that was before it went completely to shit a handful of years after. Unfortunately, the racing leagues were hurt directly by the decreasing popularity of NASCAR, so even with how committed a lot of users were to the netscene, you can only have so much fun if the player count gets too low. Over that span, I went from having multiple communities consistently getting 20-40 racers in a single race week in-week out (with multiple races per league, meaning you basically could choose what you wanted to race on a lot) to just a single community that barely could muster 10-15. It was a rather heartbreaking experience as a racing simulator fan to see this happen over the years and I eventually stepped away as well as a result, all thanks to the mismanagement of a sport I had stopped watching half-a-decade earlier. I do watch other forms of racing, but NASCAR had a lot more potential than it ended up with, especially after they began their purge of unique shapes in favor of more generic 2-mile D-ovals and 1.5-mile quad-ovals instead of road courses, paperclips, doglegs and other interesting, asymmetrical shapes for tracks.

I went to a Race in Richmond for a night race and while there were a lot of folks, there were plenty of empty seats. The night races there used to sell every seat at the Stadium. The tailgating is fun, and the races are pretty fun to go to, but I don't like the system that's in place nowadays. Hopefully it goes back to what made the sport one of the most popular in the US.

Sorry for the dumb joke but I can't help myself: Trust Americans to fuck up something as simple as driving around in a circle, haha. I don't watch NASCAR so I won't pretend that I know what's gone wrong with it. But NASCAR does come across as a bit of a stale formula. Maybe people just want something different. And I think there's a cultural change all over the world in that younger people these days just aren't as interested in motorsports.

Except they're changing things TOO much, alienating their old fans while the people they're trying to appeal to continue not giving a shit.

sounds like nascar sunday to me

What Mr France has done is piss on a pile of shit. Even if he didn’t become the CEO, it would still have been a pile of shit. Okay not the best analogy, but let me explain my perception here: The Sprint Cup cars and the overall format of the NASCAR competitions is fundamentally the same today as they were 10 or even 20 years ago. What’s the point of continuing to watch it every single year if it’s going to be the exact same thing as last year? Meanwhile, international series are always seeking exciting, tangible ways to re-invent themselves. Take the V8 Supercars in Australia: it was just Ford and Holden sedans until the new regulations in 2013, when Mercedes, Nissan and Volvo all jumped in. And Volvo even brought a flatplane V8 with them. From next year, the series will also welcome coupés and non-V8s. Or take Formula One. Yeah the hybrid era has been controversial, but it was a change that got people watching it again. They also widened the cars from 2017, and it was worth watching Formula 1 again just to see how great the cars look now. And from next year, the cars will rev higher; that will be also worth tuning in to. Lots of good ideas have been injected into Formula One in recent years. Point is, those other series around the world are almost constantly bringing in change and uncertainty; they’re bringing in ‘new’, which is exciting. What has NASCAR done in the past few decades that ushered in something tangible (not that chase bullshit) with a ‘new’ sticker on it? As I said, I don’t watch NASCAR so maybe I’m not the best judge. But the only ‘new’ thing that I can think of regarding NASCAR is when the Sprint Cup cars had the rear wings for like a single season, about ten years ago?

Tell that to attendance and TV ratings. This is completely incorrect. Cars went from this: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/0974a74b-ba13-498b-97b4-baa8b4dde15c/image.png To this monstrosity - which was wider, heavier, and had a splitter that kept falling off: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/ca4b3328-76d1-4264-9408-bfeb653d980c/image.png To this, which honestly looks pretty cool, but has the aerodynamics of a brick and drives like hot garbage: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/ee0679d2-bc34-4897-999b-5fbdd86f612f/image.png (and still has the splitter which explodes the front of your car if you put one wheel on the grass ever) https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213991/713909b5-8f29-4647-9b88-f5171e896355/03166f8d3d4345a86e62a98e84623f75.gif See...those were GOOD changes, for the most part. NASCAR has attracted all of one new manufacturer in the past 15 years (Toyota) and lost one (Dodge). Expenses have skyrocketed thanks to the new car, driving smaller teams out of the sport. The new cars (twice), dividing races into 3 segments, the "overtime line" which basically insures huge wrecks at the end of races, the 5 minute repair timer...etc. I'm especially miffed about that last one, since repairs can only be done on pit road (which puts the crew in danger), repairs are worse quality since they have to rush like mad to meet the timer, and you're heavily restricted on what you can actually repair. None of these changes has done anything good for the racing, because drivers are too busy wrestling with the cars to actually race anyone. For someone that doesn't watch NASCAR you sure act like a fuckin' know-it-all.

Well I hate to say it but you sorta helped confirm my point. According to your own post, the only major changes that happened in that entire time frame were that the shape of the cars was changed twice (one of those times was for the worst), one manufacturer left and another came on, they changed how repairs are done, made the change to three stints per weekend and whatever that overtime line is. Those are hardly changes which would attract anyone to watch the sport. Whereas other, more successful categories make more interesting changes even as often as every year. Maybe NASCAR needs to do something radical (by NASCAR standards) like street circuits or encouraging other manufacturers to join by allowing for different engine configurations.

I really don't know how street courses would work in nascar. Nascar DOES need more road courses, and there are plenty to choose from. 2/36 races is not enough. Also, manufacturers in Nascar are really nothing more than a sponsor and an aero package. The cars are built by the teams. They share zero components with the road cars. The top 3 NASCAR series are basically spec series with the exception of minor aerodynamic differences between the car "makes". Engines are built by the teams as well, and are all 358 cubic inch V8s. I can't see them allowing anything else any time soon, especially since they just switched to fuel injection recently.

The Charlotte road course makes that three now. I'd like to see them try CotA but Gossage is a dickhead.

seems somewhat ironic that the guy who threatened teams and drivers over Trump's fucked up flag protest crusade is himself a person of very low moral character. Who knew?

There are so many good road courses they could go to in the US but they just refuse to do it. It's one of the reasons I switched to Indycar - a lot more variety there.