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Post by jlp4345 on Aug 8, 2017 9:20:24 GMT -5
I'm thinking some big changes are coming. I may be wrong but been hearing several things, some of them I hope are just rumors but who knows. I definitely heard from several places that Aric has been shopping himself around for months now, and that he can bring Smithfield as a sponsor with him. That bothers me some in a way, more I think because of trying to take Smithfield with him but still, when the boats taking on water you don't jump and leave the rest of your crew when they've stood by you, you grab a bucket and help the situation. Also even heard another crazy thing, which I hope is just a rumor, but that Aric because of shopping around with Smithfield, has somehow got Richard Childress to now be in talks with RPM about merging into one team, where the 43 and the 3 will be out of the same shop. I don't even know what to say about that if that was to be true. Personally I've never really cared much for Childress, he stole General Mills from Petty some years back and this just sounds like a way to take another sponsor and in the long run even more. I don't know, but there's too much talk, and too many drivers this year changing rides and out of rides, and more talk of more for something not to change. Also I can tell the demeanor on the in car radio has been a lot different the last couple of weeks, they come across like they are just trying to get through with this year, like they know something is already changed. All I wanted was an alliance with somebody to help them start to run better, I definitely don't want RPM to be eventually absorbed by Childress or somebody. Has anyone else heard any of this or anything else?
Jason
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Post by twiss43 on Aug 8, 2017 15:02:58 GMT -5
I believe there are still 3 owners at RPM. They would all have to agree on something like this. I hope the rumor is just that about Aric shopping around. Lots of other drivers looking for rides as well.
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Post by pb1945 on Aug 8, 2017 22:01:30 GMT -5
Lots of people here WAY MORE plugged in than me. My fifty cent take if Aric is shopping himself around is........ you only have so many good years with reflex's good enough to win IF you have the car. If I was Aric I would feel the same in many respects they aren't getting better and he's in a car that frankly is not COMPETITIVE in any way.
I'm a 55 year plus Petty fan and I would hate to see RPM fold. Competitive wise they aren't making any progress that's been clearly demonstrated over the last few years. I've said it before..... how long will Smithfield continue to put out the BIG bucks for a Non Competitive car.  ?? If Aric is going to win a few I think it's going to be in a much better car. Who knows maybe they want Bubba Walace in the 43 who knows.
Folks it's about money too, LOTS OF IT.
Dan 
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Post by jessn16 on Aug 13, 2017 21:44:01 GMT -5
My take on this...
1) When Medallion Financial bought Petty Enterprises, I did a lot of research into the parent company. At the time, Medallion Bank had two major business streams: Taxicab medallions and loans (usually commercial) that other banks don't usually touch. Both business models have been hammered (and I own Medallion stock, my IRA will attest to the whipping it's taken). On one hand, Uber/Lyft is really cutting into the taxi business, to the point that unless the government steps in and takes some of the free market out of this business model (a possibility if Uber/Lyft won't get some of their hiring/business practices under control), I would not be surprised to see the medallion business in general essentially dry up over the next 2-3 decades. The bank side of Medallion is under competition now from some of the more traditional lenders, as unfortunately once again, subprime loans are making a comeback. Medallion does its best work when it's one of the few companies taking on risk in that environment; when larger banks start to play in that space as well, Medallion isn't capitalized on par. Short version: RPM's ownership isn't as stable as some other teams, in my opinion.
2) Richard is old and there is no clear succession plan once he retires/dies. I've asked this before, but when he goes, does Kyle take over? If that happens, I think you can continue to play off the Petty name a bit. If this goes to grandkids instead, the general public doesn't know who they are. If he leaves the sport and Kyle doesn't take over, there is no intangible asset to this team. It becomes a few cars, a building and some engineers. The fact Richard continues to be relatively silent about succession with each successive year makes me think even he doesn't know how it's going to work out.
3) I would not be surprised if Petty and Childress merged. For that matter, that might end up being the best possibility on the board because Richard Childress probably has more fondness for NASCAR history and traditions than any owner right now and would likely try to show as much deference to Richard Petty as possible. The fact of the matter is this sport is shrinking. We're going to be down to 30-35 cars next year with the chance fields will shrink even further in coming years. NASCAR leadership has no focus to its plans, either. We've got them courting other manufacturers, tinkering with the schedule, and I'm not sure I completely understand how to qualify for things anymore (playoffs, all-star race, Daytona pre-lims, anything). Too much change in such a short period of time. I really think the sport is in trouble in its current form.
Jess
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Post by pmossberg on Aug 14, 2017 9:40:14 GMT -5
Very well thought out Jess.
This is more coherent than anything I've read in mainstream sports reporting!
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Post by jlp4345 on Aug 14, 2017 17:14:46 GMT -5
I agree, very well written Jess. I don't really know how it will end up playing out, but I kind of figured since Brian Moffitt has kind of been running RPM as I believe CEO, which is Richard's son in law, that they'd end up keeping it in the family that way. They have a son Thad, Richard's grandson, and they have been bringing him up the past few years in Late Models and such. Thad has been running a limited Arca schedule this year and always runs the #46. If things go as planned I wouldn't be surprised to see him in Arca full time in '18 with possibly a truck race or two. I was thinking that they were looking to do with him now like they had planned with Adam before.
Jason
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Post by jessn16 on Aug 15, 2017 19:59:32 GMT -5
I agree, very well written Jess. I don't really know how it will end up playing out, but I kind of figured since Brian Moffitt has kind of been running RPM as I believe CEO, which is Richard's son in law, that they'd end up keeping it in the family that way. They have a son Thad, Richard's grandson, and they have been bringing him up the past few years in Late Models and such. Thad has been running a limited Arca schedule this year and always runs the #46. If things go as planned I wouldn't be surprised to see him in Arca full time in '18 with possibly a truck race or two. I was thinking that they were looking to do with him now like they had planned with Adam before. Jason I'm not sure how to best put it, but unless Thad changes his last name to Petty from Moffitt, it's not going to connect. I think RPM gets sold off after Richard's exit from the sport. I'm not sure of that but only because I don't know what the ownership percentages are. If Medallion holds a controlling stake, the only thing they're going to care about is what they can sell the asset for. Right now I bet they're upside-down on their investment as most NASCAR teams probably are over the past decade. If Medallion decides to go long on NASCAR, they'll hold, but only until a good sales window opens and then they dump it -- *unless* RPM is generating a sufficient income stream. I haven't looked at MFG's financials in awhile but the attraction to buying MFIN at one time was when MFIN wasn't MFIN; it was when it was TAXI, and generating dividend revenue off taxicab medallions. The change in stock ticker symbol ought to tell you something about their business focus and their opinion on the medallion market. I don't know what the P&L looks like on RPM but I do know MFIN's dividend got slashed and burned a year or so ago, which is not out of character for this company, but the stock price hasn't rebounded yet. With the dividend down, I would have to assume their income is also down. As of 2016, they were expanding into the consumer loan business (I'm assuming things like Citi Financial storefront-type stuff), so either that's not going well or there's something else happening at the company. Anywhoo, what matters here is whether MFIN decides the initial purchase of then-Petty Enterprises can be recouped and/or NASCAR is about to enter a growth phase. I don't know on the former; I'm almost certain the latter is not going to happen. To give you an idea of what MFIN is facing, this paints a terrible picture: seekingalpha.com/article/4024104-medallion-financial-failed-taxi-empire-crash-course-creditorsAs it relates to Richard, if he can (or wants to) buy back a controlling share in the company -- or if he has one already (which I doubt -- then there is yet hope he can pass it down to the Moffitts and it look like a legitimate handoff. Because as it is now, the one and only reason the Moffitts are involved with the team is MFIN allowed it. If MFIN divests, I would be surprised if any covenants requiring Petty family involvement go with the sale -- especially if those family members don't share the name. Jess |
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Post by pb1945 on Aug 16, 2017 22:19:58 GMT -5
When it comes down to money are these owning companies like Medallion are they really trying to make money or isn't this a write off ?? I'm just making a ball park guess but I would think it would take 20 million or more to fund a competitive team. Could a owner really expect to make that kind of profit, to plus up 15-20 million to cover the team and expect to make a worth while investment ??
I'm really curious what you guys think and honestly what you know. This is a crazy expensive sport. Nothing like F-1 though good god those figures are just stupid crazy.
Can these teams really carry that kind of money ?? Lowes can ..... Pennzoil, Mobile, beer companies etc. Doesn't look like Home Depot wants back in.
If and when the Petty name comes off that's the end of a lot of involvement possibilities. Kyle may have the Petty name but he has none of the draw power the level Richard does.
Somehow I think as long as Richard is breathing he will be involved. Maybe not at the track every race but still solidly involved.
I would love to see the 43 comeback as a competitive car and have a few years back in the lime light again.
Dan
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Post by jessn16 on Aug 17, 2017 0:46:27 GMT -5
When it comes down to money are these owning companies like Medallion are they really trying to make money or isn't this a write off ?? I'm just making a ball park guess but I would think it would take 20 million or more to fund a competitive team. Could a owner really expect to make that kind of profit, to plus up 15-20 million to cover the team and expect to make a worth while investment ??
I'm really curious what you guys think and honestly what you know. This is a crazy expensive sport. Nothing like F-1 though good god those figures are just stupid crazy.
Can these teams really carry that kind of money ?? Lowes can ..... Pennzoil, Mobile, beer companies etc. Doesn't look like Home Depot wants back in.
If and when the Petty name comes off that's the end of a lot of involvement possibilities. Kyle may have the Petty name but he has none of the draw power the level Richard does.
Somehow I think as long as Richard is breathing he will be involved. Maybe not at the track every race but still solidly involved.
I would love to see the 43 comeback as a competitive car and have a few years back in the lime light again.
Dan The wild card here is Medallion is a publicly-traded company. I'm unaware that any other NASCAR team is owned by a publicly-traded company, although I could be wrong about that. With that comes shareholders, lots of them, and every business decision Medallion's board makes is subject to shareholder approval to some extent. If Medallion goes under, things really get messy because RPM will be sold immediately to reimburse creditors. A bankruptcy court would handle that and Richard would have no say in the matter. I think we're the only team that has to watch for this. And what I mean by that is, I'm not sure whether the other dozen or so teams are turning a profit, but we'd better. Medallion didn't buy this team to race, they bought it to make money. A publicly-held company that told its shareholders, "Hey folks, we know it's expensive but we're going to go NASCAR racing because we want to win races, forget how much it costs" would be forcibly reorganized before sundown. The only way it makes sense for Medallion to race without an eye toward a revenue stream was if they bought RPM to serve as a massive rolling billboard for its own holdings, which they could justify to shareholders as advertising. Except for a scattered few races where one of the RPM cars has carried a taxicab paint scheme, I can't remember too many times they actually did that. They have no holdings in Smithfield that I'm aware of. Medallion's financial health is our biggest problem, as unhealthy companies often make desperate decisions with their revenue streams. But our second-biggest problem, we share with all the other teams, and it's what you mention: Lowe's/Pennzoil/Home Depot/etc. Those sponsorships are drying up everywhere, not just at RPM. When Target decided to leave despite having plenty of track success, that should have been a huge, glow-in-the-dark red flag waving at all of us. And that's a NASCAR problem, not an RPM problem per se. I'm not sure what's going to happen to the sport overall. I could definitely see us shrinking down to what IRL was about 5-10 years ago at its lowest point, where they were having to beg for 33 cars at Indy and then raced 18-22 at all the other venues. I could easily see NASCAR having a full field at Daytona and nowhere else. IRL/IndyCar has done an OK job of walking back some of the cost explosion, and if you've seen the new car they'll race next year, it's beautiful in its simplicity. But it's still a different game than it was 20 years ago when you had 2 or 3 different chassis makers and guys like Ron Hemelgarn could still put together enough funding to run limited schedules and still be competitive. So how do you fix it? I don't think you can. If anything I think you have to purposefully get smaller. Encourage people to resurrect some of the old short tracks and go back there. Run on dirt. It looks like they're going to do something I've been advocating for awhile, which is add a road course or two, as Watkins Glen in particular has shown how to be successful by promoting a different crowd experience. But when you turn on the TV to the Brickyard and see a mostly empty venue -- and then the same thing starts happening at your "home" tracks like Charlotte -- it just makes people think the ride is over. And remember we lose the last "real" Earnhardt next year, which will help things exactly zero. Jess |
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Post by pb1945 on Aug 17, 2017 23:35:27 GMT -5
Jessen you sure make a lot of sense. I remember about 12-15 years ago I read that to put a car on the front row at Indy was 3 million plus. Look what happened to Indy after that era. NASCAR has to be going through the same thing, the GOLD MINE of the late 80's early 90's is over. They just flat out overbuilt. Yep there was a field of dreams build it they will come. They dropped smaller tracks built cookie cutter 1 1/2 mile tracks for a while they did come. The money just out grew the sport.
One of NASCARS biggest first mistakes was Rockingham. That track was and still is beloved.
Kinda seems like everything NASCAR is a billboard. Bands before races and after. Go out and lay around on the track oh yeah they charge extra for that too. MMA fights. You have to pay the bills but when you create more than you can handle, the people are crazy for this they will come in droves and bring big money. That happened for a while. Now they are lucky to get the stands half full at several tracks. TV did a lot of that. But now they are too far into TV to get rid of it. I think not to far in the future you may just have to pay to watch NASCAR.
I may be way off base but I see some of this coming. I can see them still developing a new competitive NASCAR car they just about have that now. The race on Sunday sell on Monday isn't what it used to be. My generation and a couple after are almost gone. The days of cars being a HUGE part of a young mans life are almost gone. 95 percent of the young people I know never change their own oil. Electric cars are only just a FEW years away.
But before all goes to hell in a hand basket LOL I would love to see the 43 win a few races. Don't think it is going to happen with what they have now. Merging and getting better techs and cars may be the answer. What ever is lacking RPM just can't find it. Sad, Sad, Sad but that's the truth.
Dan
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Post by jessn16 on Aug 19, 2017 0:52:53 GMT -5
Jessen you sure make a lot of sense. I remember about 12-15 years ago I read that to put a car on the front row at Indy was 3 million plus. Look what happened to Indy after that era. NASCAR has to be going through the same thing, the GOLD MINE of the late 80's early 90's is over. They just flat out overbuilt. Yep there was a field of dreams build it they will come. They dropped smaller tracks built cookie cutter 1 1/2 mile tracks for a while they did come. The money just out grew the sport.
One of NASCARS biggest first mistakes was Rockingham. That track was and still is beloved.
Kinda seems like everything NASCAR is a billboard. Bands before races and after. Go out and lay around on the track oh yeah they charge extra for that too. MMA fights. You have to pay the bills but when you create more than you can handle, the people are crazy for this they will come in droves and bring big money. That happened for a while. Now they are lucky to get the stands half full at several tracks. TV did a lot of that. But now they are too far into TV to get rid of it. I think not to far in the future you may just have to pay to watch NASCAR.
I may be way off base but I see some of this coming. I can see them still developing a new competitive NASCAR car they just about have that now. The race on Sunday sell on Monday isn't what it used to be. My generation and a couple after are almost gone. The days of cars being a HUGE part of a young mans life are almost gone. 95 percent of the young people I know never change their own oil. Electric cars are only just a FEW years away.
But before all goes to hell in a hand basket LOL I would love to see the 43 win a few races. Don't think it is going to happen with what they have now. Merging and getting better techs and cars may be the answer. What ever is lacking RPM just can't find it. Sad, Sad, Sad but that's the truth.
Dan Back when Indy was at its biggest, it was just a really strange sport. Like you said, you want to sit front row, bring a couple mil. But at the same time, they had a local dentist who would come out for qualifying every year (Jack Miller, I think his name was) and make it every now and then. The most exciting part of the month was the old Bump Day with 10 cars vying for one spot, and everyone was about 20 mph slower than the front row. That *WAS* their race, as they had no chance once the green dropped. Major sporting attendance is down just about everywhere to some extent; TV coverage plus 70-inch ULEV televisions in living rooms are driving that. My family and I have been season ticket holders at University of Alabama football games for about 60 years now. Our ticket package this year for 4 tickets was around $4,000, and we're in one of the less expensive categories. That doesn't include parking ($35/game on average) plus a 6-hour round trip from my house seven times a year, gas, meals, etc. How tired of that do you think I get sometimes when we've had games three weeks in a row and on the third week, we get hit with the 11 a.m. kickoff slot? So easy just to hit the snooze button, wake up at kickoff and catch it on SEC Network. I've said this before, and it's controversial, but NASCAR really lost a lot of people on the Car of Tomorrow. Not only did it make the racing boring and bad for several years, it made it too safe. Barbaric to say, but people aren't going to get fired up about things they think they can do themselves, or aren't scared to do. It's why we watch Evel Knievel, or X-Games, or NBA, etc.: Those guys are perceived as daredevils or crazy or just so out of scope with our athletic abilities that they come across as supermen. It's also why the WNBA doesn't work, why televising Division-III football games doesn't work, etc.: Those athletes aren't perceived as the best of the best. When the CoT hit, the cars stopped being snarling, half-out-of-control deathtraps and started coming across as cars that no matter how hard you hit something, you were never in any real danger. And some fans left the sport over it, right or wrong. Irony here is that Dale Earnhardt Sr. really pushed the sport into CoT development, when he himself would have survived his own wreck if he'd just tightened his seat belts properly and worn a full-face helmet. I miss Rockingham; I miss North Wilkesboro even more. I miss the old Bristol (yes, it was better). I miss real characters like Dave Marcis and Jimmy Spencer. Jimmy Spencer and Kurt Busch punching on each other was such a hoot. Marcis in his wingtips, Dale Sr. and Terry Labonte drawling at each other. Ward Burton ("This .. this ... this car ain't wurf a day-umm") talking like a cartoon character. Darrell Waltrip's general nuttiness, Kenny Wallace's court jester act, J.D. McDuffie towing his own car to a race. Everything now is too sanitized, too corporate, even with the Busch brothers. If it wasn't for Keselowski tweeting pics from his car during a red flag (and of course, he gets in trouble for that) I would swear we had 43 robots out there. Jess |
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Post by pb1945 on Aug 20, 2017 16:21:01 GMT -5
Yes to all the above. I remember when a reporter freaked out when Bobby Hamiton told him he watched the jumbo screen going down the back stretch
at Daytona.
Nothing stays the same but I think NASCAR could have left a few things alone the main one is the COT, absolutely tripling the rule book to the point if you don't have access to some specialized equipment you probably aren't going to be able to pass tech.
How about the fine for a missing lug nut when the race is over. Are you kidding me. Your car just got the hell beat out of it for 500 miles but you have to run over a laser post race. I seriously can't get over that.
The short tracks are famous for damage. But lemme tell ya when I was stationed at March AFB Riverside CA I lived two blocks from the track. Folks I have seen some cars finish that race including Richard a couple times I couldn't tell who or what kinda of car it was. Cars left that track like they were driving on butter. If your man was leaning when he went by the next lap you kinda squinted when you thought he was due to come around.
It is what it is though, for us old folks we just gotta lump it.
Dan
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?? If Aric is going to win a few I think it's going to be in a much better car. Who knows maybe they want Bubba Walace in the 43 who knows. 
