NASCAR forced to reduce size of fields

UPDATE #2 This ESPN.com article goes into more depth of the struggles NASCAR teams are having finding sponsors. When Toyota came in they raised the bar and the cost it takes to win. Now as the economy has soured teams are finding it hard to raise enough money to field a winning car – close to $30M per year.

10/15/08 During testing at Lowe's Motor Speedway, Felix Sabates, Chip Ganassi's partner told reporters he thinks by 2010 eight cars will leave NASCAR and not be replaced and that will lead NASCAR to shrink race fields to 36 cars.

This as a byproduct of the toll the economy is taking on race teams.

It's an interesting take on the matter by a guy who knows the inner workings of the racing business.

And it makes a lot of sense. Owning a race-team is not a money-making proposition. At some point an owner has to wonder if it makes sense to keep running an underfunded team. Over the weekend Dale Earnhardt Jr. said his team will only run as many cars and as many races as it can afford to run. Seems like a simple idea, but a lot of owners don't stick to it. Ganassi, for example, spent several million of his own dollars to try to keep the No. 40 team afloat before finally giving up.

In the Cup garages as well as the Nationwide garages, there's a plethora of cars that don't have sponsors either on a steady basis or at all. And in a classic case of the rich getting richer. Teams with clout, like Richard Childress Racing, are acquiring sponsors that leave other, less successful teams.

Eventually, the less successful teams will hang it up. Orlando Sentinel

10/13/08 NASCAR, like so many others, is hurting from the current economic chaos. Races feature grandstands with patches of empty seats. Fans can't afford to attend. Corporate sponsors are skittish about spending more cash on stock-car racing.

It could get worse.

In the aftermath of the near meltdown in financial markets last week, General Motors reportedly has held separate merger talks with both Ford and Chrysler.

Those three, along with Toyota, are the car makes used in NASCAR's premier Sprint Cup Series, and combining any of them would raise the obvious question: Would their involvement in NASCAR stay the same or be cut back? LA Times

Another sign of the times is the rumor that NASCAR has floated the possibility of a change in the field size for the Craftsman Truck and Nationwide Series to 28 vehicles and the Cup field down to 36 sometime in the future. Yahoo! Sports