The owner of several fast food and restaurant franchises, Front Row Motorsports team owner Bob Jenkins doesn’t spend a lot of time at the race track and hasn’t been as available regarding the ongoing charter system negotiations with NASCAR.
Jenkins made himself available on Wednesday as his team introduced Noah Gragson as one of its two next drivers starting next season. While there, Sportsnaut asked Jenkins what he wants to see accomplished as the teams and sanctioning body try to forge a new revenue sharing agreement.
“We just have to be viable, right,” Jenkins told Sportsnaut. “And NASCAR is open to that, right? I know people say it’s contentious but it’s always contentious when we want more and they don’t want to give us more and I understand that but there is also a middle ground there somewhere that we will land on.
“But at the end of the day, it’s incumbent on the teams to help NASCAR grow the sport but it’s also incumbent on NASCAR to help the teams be more viable.”
The short version of these negotiations is that team owners want a larger share of revenue so that they are less dependent on sponsorship revenue so they will be able to invest in growing the sport through various marketing activations.
That’s a really simplistic version, of which more can be read on the matter here, here and here, but the teams just want viability.
“There were 19 teams when we started this system and there’s seven of them left,” Jenkins said of the inaugural charter system group from the 2016 season. “That’s not good odds, you know?
“If there is a 50 percent chance of survival in your charter system, you probably need a new charter system. That’s my plea to NASCAR — to help us become viable so we can at least break even and go out and compete and help grow the sport because then we can focus on getting fans at the track and supporting our races, watching on TV. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We have to find a way to get this done and get it past us.”
While NASCAR has attempted to negotiate through teams individually, especially the smaller teams like the one owned by Jenkins, the teams have collectively negotiated through the Teams Negotiating Committee comprised of Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon, 23XI Racing investor Curtis Polk, RFK Racing president Steve Newmark and Dave Alpern, president of Joe Gibbs Racing.
That’s more of a reflection of the larger teams than the smaller ones but Jenkins said he feels as though his voice is expressed through the TNC and that he stands with the owners, holistically.
“I really do,” he said.
“I think the legacy owners are very respectful and I’ve become good friends with several of them, like Joe Gibbs and Richard Childress, and so I value their opinion and they value mine. The ownership group, we compete every week on the track, but we’re friends away from it. We would do anything for each other. There are some I don’t know so well but the ones I do, I feel like I could ask for anything and vice versa.”
There hasn’t been any major movement in recent weeks, beyond teams responding to a proposal last month by calling it worse than any that preceded it, and both sides seems pretty dug in at the moment.
Brad Keselowski was asked about the timeline over the weekend too and he said ‘ehh,’ followed by a long pause.
“Yeah (laughs) it was a long pause,” Keselowski said. “Ultimately, It doesn’t have to be signed until we unload the cars at (the) Daytona (500). Although, I suspect it will be signed before then, and in fact, I’m very confident it will be signed before that, I’m very hesitant to give a date or time of when.”
He likened it to a major household renovation.
“These things tend to wait to get done until they have to get done because its like house chores, whichever one that is the hardest, isn’t the one you do first, right? We all want to get it done but its not a fun thing to get done so I suspect we’ll get it done when we have to and not when we want it done.”