Infamy is fleeting, as George C. Scott almost said at the end of “Patton.” Wasn’t it just yesterday that the Brickyard 400 became the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, prompting rants from grumpy old sportswriters that the world was going to hell at Mach speed, and you know what you can do with those Good Hands?
I vaguely remember writing something along those lines.
Now I’m going to write this: Allstate, we hardly knew ye.
The company announced Monday it’s ending its sponsorship of the Brickyard after five years, and now we all know what comes next: the Poulan Weed-Eater 400 at the Brickyard. Or the Extenze 400 at the Brickyard. Or the ShamWow/Oxiclean/20 Minute Abs 400 at the Brickyard.
Someone will jump in to fill the void, because no investment opportunity of this magnitude lies fallow for long in a pinched economy. That’s the good news for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The bad news is the pinched economy also makes investors more selective – and suddenly a NASCAR race at Indianapolis is no longer the slam dunk it used to be.
And so questions about the future of NASCAR at Indy that seemed presumptuous three days ago no longer seem that way, despite the firm denials from outgoing president and chief operating officer Joey Chitwood that NASCAR isn’t going anywhere. Allstate insists last year’s fiasco and its conspicuous fallout – swaths of unpopulated seats were visible everywhere around the track Sunday, with some sections more than half-empty at race time – didn’t play into its decision, and perhaps that’s so. But clearly it didn’t make Allstate’s decision more difficult.
“The property performed well, extremely well, in fact,” Allstate spokesman Raleigh Floyd said. “It just so happens that some of our other sponsorships perform a little better.”
Like college football, for instance, where Allstate is a title sponsor of the Sugar Bowl. Like the Olympics, where Allstate, based in suburban Chicago, hopes to cash in on Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games.
NASCAR at Indy?
A poor third.
And, sure, maybe that would still have been true eight or nine years ago, but at least then you’d have to think about it. Now you don’t. And that has to be a major concern for the Speedway as well as NASCAR, which has seen its TV and attendance numbers fall off sharply for a variety of reasons, only some of which have to do with the recession.
The stone truth is NASCAR is no longer the value it once was, and that leaves it in a particularly shaky position with the Speedway now in the hands of a more economically austere leadership. A NASCAR race at Indy still has enough cachet to make any chance of a breakup remote, but with the Indy Racing League continuing to eat up assets and the slump showing only intermittent signs of easing, the new bosses at IMS no doubt will be taking a harder look than usual at what is cost-effective and what is not.
Allstate bailing on the Brickyard certainly doesn’t do NASCAR any favors in that regard.
Those Good Hands, it must be thinking, sure picked a fine time to develop fumbleitis.
