Is this a sport? It is car driving, isn't it?
What next, poker?
Bill: Define "sport".
Now, put in the simplest economic terms, if an owner can find a sponsor for a team, the marginal benefits of campaigning another car seem to outweigh the marginal costs, at least up to 5 (the number of cars run by Roush.)
Furthermore, in a sport that has become so extremely regulated, the search for incremental advantages becomes tougher, and having multiple cars in each race (and each test session) improves the odds of finding one of these tiny advantages.
The only 5-car team is at the top right now, and the only 4-car team is a close second. There's a pretty big gap to the next team.
As I made clear in an earlier post, I'm with Bill on this one. But since the post is from one of the founding fathers of the blog, maybe we should define sport to be whatever gets posted here?
Auto racing is as much a sport as sprinting or pole vaulting or golf or baseball, or any other form of finite-length competition that blends human ability with technology.
If you chose to define sport as nothing more than pure athleticism, then there are very few things aside from olympic wrestling or barefoot running that qualify as a sport. And even those use technology as inputs to the training process.
Like golf or baseball, the technology is becoming more homogeneous all the time, so differences in abilities are amplified as the marginal factor between winning and, say, 14th place.
But anyways, motorsports fans have long become inured to the rants of the stick-and-ball crowd. As the ad says, we can't hear you.
Regardless of what any of us might think, there are facts:
a) car racing is covered in the sports section of newspapers & in magazines like SI;
b) articles on motor sports appear in academic journals devoted to issues in "sport;"
c) spectators in large numbers pay big bucks to attend a motor race, legions watch it in beer soaked t-shirts in front of their TVs, and it is not opera;
d) car racing is an intense competition, requiring physical and mental endurance, coupled with the ability to listen to the radio and turn left.
So we can talk about the economics of Nascar here, especially since it is not opera.
"Strategic" driving is not nearly as common in NASCAR as in, say, F1, mostly because even if two cars ave a common owner, they usually have separate sponsors, and no sponsor will be happy seeing "his" car lie down for another one with a different sponsor.
For people who are unfamiliar with it, First Monday has an interesting article that touches upon 'strategic driving', titled "Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways".
The FIA has attempted to prohibit 'team orders' or 'strategic driving' in Formula 1, and that is an environment where teams are restricted to two cars each. Has NASCAR sought to prohibit such actions?
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