[Bob Riebe]

This piece was just written about NASCAR but one can put SCCA Trans-Am or IMSA GT in its place.
I removed the parts that are more alined with NASCAR alone.

Let's do this right. Let's knock the bottom out. Let's envision the worst kind of economic scenario for NASCAR …

All the carmakers have pulled out entirely. There is no technical, let alone financial, support from them.
Several major team owners have gone away. NASCAR is no longer a profitable venture for big businessmen.

Of the teams that are left, only about 10 percent have adequate sponsorship to run a full season, and even they are down to one-car operations. The rest are vagabonds, racing week to week, hand to mouth.

Race fields usually are 30-something cars -- or whatever number might show up.
Fuel shortages are so dire that there is fear the federal government might shut down auto racing altogether.

Job layoffs have been so massive nationwide, and gasoline prices are so high, that attendance is less than half that of the 1990s and early 2000s.
During this, the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Dow is in the process of shedding nearly half its value.

In the garages, between practices, the top drivers sit on the workbenches near their cars with nothing to do but talk to what few media people come around. There are no TV commercials to be done, no public appearances to be made. They are not mobbed for autographs.

Maybe a third of the teams can even afford uniforms for crewmen, who are paid week-to-week in handwritten checks that might or might not bounce.

There are no catered meals at the tracks. Lunch is Vienna sausage, bologna sandwiches, Beanee Weenee.
One thing about these conditions: Now we know who the real racers are. They're the only ones left.

I don't have to imagine the above scenario. I need only remember it.

Welcome to the NASCAR I began covering, during the hard times of 1974-76, the first global recession after the global depression.

Even before the terrible downturn, Detroit manufacturers had pulled out of NASCAR, and nobody expected them to come back. Ever.

Sponsorships were rare and lean, $100,000 a season tops, and only two were multiyear -- STP for Richard Petty, and Purolator for the Wood Brothers and their driver, David Pearson.

Multitasking?
Bobby Allison and Buddy Baker usually managed to scrape together a little backing, a season at a time.
Cale Yarborough and his car owner, Junior Johnson, started the 1975 season with no sponsorship at all.

Was it dreary? Depressed? Depressing?
Hell, no.
It was wonderful -- wild, colorful, candid, the garages reeking of rugged individualism, roguish innovation, rowdy can-do spirit.

And for the general public, legends and folk heroes arose from those garages, because the rough-hewn men would all talk to us in the tiny press corps. They would tell us the truth about their lives and careers, about how they saw the world.
If some publicist or marketing expert had come around advising Junior Johnson that he shouldn't talk about his moonshine running or his prison term, Junior would have told that person to kiss his backside, and wouldn't have cared if we quoted him.

I had a recurring thought during the TV ratings boom for NASCAR through the past 20 years: If America thinks it likes these drivers and this racing, it should have seen those guys and that racing when there was little TV to speak of.
Ratings would have gone through the roof for the hard-knocks boys, who were real before reality shows were cool.

There were no drivers who got there on money alone, no pretty boys, no sissies, no whiners, no hucksters, no marketing people, no rapacious car owners, no venture capitalists, no prudish corporate sponsors, no PR hustlers, no image-makers.

This industry, when times get tough, has proven that it can get tough. Some of the best car owners in the garage know what a good bologna sandwich tastes like.

From '76 through '78, Yarborough won three straight championships on sponsorship of less than $300,000 a year -- or less than 1 percent of the $30 million a year Jimmie Johnson, likely to be the first threepeat champion since Yarborough, has raced on.

The inflation in the general economy these past 30 years cannot nearly account for the more than 100-fold increase in the cost of a driver's winning championships.
NASCAR and its teams, as any addictive medicine specialist would say, have steadily increased their tolerance for a substance -- money -- to near insatiability.
NASCAR needs rehab, painful as withdrawal may be.

I grow weary of entire marketing/advertising campaigns being built around drivers who rarely if ever win a race. I never take fabricated stars seriously.

Lower attendance? Well, the track owners never should have overbuilt their grandstands so vastly in the 1990s. If 100,000 people in 150,000 seat grandstands -- check out Texas Motor Speedway this Sunday -- draws bad press, the promoters brought this on themselves.

Are the manufacturers about to go? Oh, well. NASCAR did fine without them. Since they came back, beginning with Ford in 1981, they've created such a zoo of one-upsmanship on engineering, corporate whining and generally wagging the dog, that when NASCAR finally put its foot down, it shot itself in the foot with the ill-advised "new car."

When NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter, one of the few who remember as far back as I do, tries to explain to this generation of media that NASCAR's fortunes are "cyclical," he is telling the truth -- but few have been here long enough to know he's right.

"This industry, when times get tough, has proven that it can get tough," Hunter said the other day at Atlanta to a gaggle of journalists. "Some of the best car owners in the garage know what a good bologna sandwich tastes like."