Barber: Gen-7 is NASCAR's ticking bomb

SONOMA

The soundtrack to this weekend’s competition at Sonoma Raceway will be, you guessed it, the noise of a couple hundred supercharged engines roaring to life in the garage area and hitting you with a Doppler effect as they circle the track.

But if all fell silent at the Toyota/Save Mart 350, which green-flags Sunday at noon, you might hear one other sound: the tick-tick-tick of the giant clock that is currently pushing NASCAR.

As the Monster Energy Cup Series heads into the second half of its season, the sport’s manufacturers, race team owners, crew chiefs, drivers, sponsors, television partners and, especially, NASCAR’s highest-level caretakers are focusing much of their attention on the future. Virtually every aspect of the industry, from operations to mechanics, is subject to change in the next few years.

“Our core fan base is literally dying,” Toyota Racing Development president David Wilson said, sounding an ominous tone. “We need the younger fans to embrace the sport.”

The extent to which fans have abandoned NASCAR is open to debate. Sonoma Raceway president Steve Page, who joined the track in 1991 when it was a scruffy racing backwater, believes the Cup series is pretty damn healthy. He knows how bad it looks when Fox Sports cameras pick up nearly 100,000 empty seats at Bristol Raceway. But as Page points out, that still leaves 60-70,000 butts in the stands.

“I get no sense that anyone is panicking,” Page said.

And Wilson didn’t suggest anyone is, either. But the reality is that NASCAR and everyone who shares a slice of its giant pie is on alert. Stock car racing’s trajectory, which looked limitless in the 1990s, has flattened and declined. Ticket sales and TV ratings are down, as they are in most sports, while costs remain steep. So yes, you can place the mood somewhere short of panic and beyond concern.

NASCAR’s response is a plan known as Gen-7. The name is most closely associated with the new car currently under design, but it applies to so much more. Race venues, schedules, length of races, customer experience - everything is on the table.

But even if you focus solely on the car, you can see the complications involved - and the pressure to invent a better product.

“What’s more important to me isn’t the calendar, per se,” Wilson said, “but that we get this right. Because if we don’t get this right, then that could be disastrous. It could cause us to have to go back and redo certain areas, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.”

Toyota Racing Development is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, as Sonoma Raceway marks its 50th. “Like two old friends celebrating birthdays together,” Wilson said.

But he could have added another. It is Wilson’s 30th anniversary with TRD. He started as a mechanical engineer who knew very little about building race engines, and is now one of the behind-the-scenes industry leaders. He will serve as Grand Marshal for Sunday’s 350.

Toyota, like its NASCAR competitors Ford and Chevrolet, has a monumental task ahead. The three OEMs - it stands for original equipment manufacturer - must work with NASCAR to build cars that are more cost effective, while preserving the performance that has created a generation of loyal enthusiasts. And it has to happen pretty quickly.

NASCAR hopes to debut the Gen-7 rides in 2021, or at least the chassis and body. The new engines are supposed to follow around 2023. Wilson calls the schedule “a very, very aggressive goal.”

There are a couple of factors at play here. The manufacturers would like the racing cars to look, and perhaps even to work like, their factory models. It helps sales, as you might imagine.

Wilson calls it “relevancy.”

The other angle is more sweeping. It has grown too expensive to own and operate a Cup series team. As Wilson said, “Today, very few of them can actually make a proper business and compete.”

One result is that NASCAR isn’t attracting new team owners. Wilson wonders why Andretti Autosports, which runs cars in six different classes, including IndyCar, hasn’t bought into NASCAR. He cites a current Monster Energy Cup driver, too.

“Why isn’t Kyle Busch pining to be a Cup team owner at the end of his career?” Wilson asked. “Because he’d be foolish.”

It’s always going to be pricey to own a NASCAR ride. These powerful, fickle machines require a lot of labor to maintain, and teams usually do a complete engine tear-down and rebuild after each race weekend.

Wilson also talks about the self-defeating nature of the garage. Under current guidelines, NASCAR teams fiddle and tinker with every aspect of the technology. If they don’t, they stand to fall behind the other teams. But it’s a huge money drain, usually for only minimal gains in aerodynamics and power.

“Sometimes we need help protecting ourselves from ourselves,” Wilson said. “Because if you give me a rulebook, my job as an engineer is to exploit every single paragraph.”

The answer to the red ink is standardization, but that’s kind of a dirty word in high-level racing. If every car is a cookie-cutter copy of the next, especially under the hood, the research-and-development costs will plummet. But that sort of eats at the spirit that has always guided the sport. That guides every sport.

So NASCAR officials, auto manufacturers and team owners have begun an intricate dance. They are working together to draw up cars that allow the most skillful engineers, mechanics and drivers to win races, while cutting down on the gap in competition. As Page put it, “How do you keep it from being ‘the rich guys always win’?”

The only guarantee is that the finished Gen-7 product will fail to make everyone happy.

“You hear drivers like Kyle Busch,” Wilson said. “He’s passionate about it, and he’s probably the best competing right now. And what he sees is his potential to compete being squeezed down. And it frustrates him to no end. … It’s just balancing that against the viability.”

The other problem with the economics is that they creates a barrier to new OEMs. There are currently three. NASCAR wants at least one more. Wilson would like more than that. When Toyota supports Lexus in its sports car racing series, they compete against eight other manufacturers.

“We need Ford and Chevrolet to succeed, as counterintuitive as that sounds,” Wilson said. “Because it is a fragile ecosystem with just three of us in the sport.”

This would all be a fun exercise, if there weren’t so much money at stake, and if big-business sports weren’t so notoriously impatient. Wilson is a team player, but he didn’t sound convinced that he’d have a new chassis on the track at the start of 2021.

“I’d like to believe as an industry that if we get to this fall, and we’re not where we need to be, that we have the courage, collectively, to push the date,” Wilson said.

Not that the mission will be over when the new car is on the track, and when things like the race calendar and the structure of a race weekend (there is talk of two days of activity rather than three) have been reconfigured. Wilson likened the process to painting a battleship. The minute they’re done, it will be time to start again.

Page said that NASCAR is much more collaborative and less top-down than when he got to Sears Point, and Wilson agrees. He noted that Jim France, NASCAR’s current CEO, visited Toyota’s North American headquarters in Plano, Texas, two weeks ago to solicit feedback on the Gen-7 project.

Wilson also knows where the rubber meets the road in this industry.

“This isn’t a democracy,” he said. “This is NASCAR’s sport. No one’s holding a gun to our head to participate.”

Only to, you know, hurry things along a bit.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.