Each week of the NASCAR off-season thus far seems to carry a theme.
Last week was the “are NASCAR fans spoiled” conversation and this week is about the grueling yearlong schedule and the challenges teams face in retaining or recruiting employees to work at the highest levels of North American motorsports.
It started on Wednesday with a tweet from SiriusXM NASCAR Radio morning show co-host Pete Pistone.
This is such a multifaceted, layered conversation because the schedule has always been an epic grind. It’s especially true in the modern era where team road crews are traveling practically every week from early February to mid-November.
It’s a slog, no doubt about it.
From experience, working in NASCAR is a total commitment and it challenges work-life balance like no other industry. That sentiment was echoed by NASCAR Xfinity Series contending driver and NBC Sports television analyst Parker Kligerman.
And while, sure, some fans will scoff and say ‘if they don’t want to do it, I will,’ a couple of years on the daily grind will leave even the most dedicated and enthusiastic of motorsport devotees exasperated.
Consider the feedback from all corners of the NASCAR industry who endorsed the sentiment on Wednesday. Ryan Bergentry, crew chief for Todd Gilliland at the Front Row Motorsports No. 38, advocated having better benefits for crew members and their families written into the upcoming charter agreement.
It’s not totally unprecedented as the Formula 1 Concorde Agreement shuts the entire sport down for weeks during the annual summer break — something NASCAR will have a chance to replicate in 2024 with the Olympics grinding the Cup Series to a halt.
The sport was so flush in money during the 2000s boom period that expansion was met with commensurate salary increases across the entire industry Modern salaries have leveled off and the pay simply isn’t competitive enough down the ladder below the Cup Series to cultivate a healthy workforce.
It takes a level of commitment to see this career through and for some, it never works out. Fortunately for JR Motorsports engineer Aedan McHugh, it did.
Former Cup Series driver and team owner Matt Tifft says other industries better reward employees’ time and their bank accounts.
From a media standpoint, for those who create content on a weekly basis, this requires flying out on Thursdays and spending all weekend from February to November on the road and returning home on Mondays just to do it again the next week.
Unlike crew members, who largely fly on private charters, media members are flying commercial every week.
But there are some systemic issues with the modern version of the sport too.
NASCAR shops used to be a place of creativity and innovation. It rewarded talent and innovation. Teams and the sanctioning body would play a cat-and-mouse game of pushing the limits of the rule book and then rewriting it in response.
It was part of the spirit of competition.
Today’s NASCAR has stripped that spirit away entirely with what amounts to a LEGO car that has pieces that can only be purchased from approved vendors and merely assembled at the shop. NASCAR says they did this to change a culture of cheating and to save teams money but all it really did, when you talk to people inside the garage, is strip a lot of the things they loved about the competition.
That has certainly pushed away smart minds and passionate racers as well.
To that point, crew chief for Denny Hamlin and the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11, Chris Gabehart, says employees sometimes wrestle with the though of it NASCAR is even ‘worth it’ anymore.
This is a conversation the NASCAR industry seemingly has every off-season but it seems to be stiffer this winter with the number of longtime shop hands leaving due to shops downsizing, rule changes associated with the NextGen car and not enough quality interested parties in filling what open positions remain.
23XI Racing engineer JR Houston says fans don’t understand what the off-season even means for those who live on the road every season.
All team general managers can do, in light of these conversations, is make positive pitches on social media like this one by Legacy Motor Club executive Joey Cohen on Wednesday.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.