Benny Parsons

I won the Winston Cup championship in 1973. Since then some of the changes I have seen in the sport are hard for me to believe. Their impact has been huge, but these changes certainly haven't hindered NASCAR's popularity as the fan base for stock-car racing continues to grow.

Climbing
costs
Money is the single biggest difference in the sport today as compared to several decades ago when I was racing.

It's eye-opening the amount of money the teams are spending to run their schedules.

I've been involved in Cup racing since 1970, and to me the cost of what it takes to run an operation nowadays is just staggering.

Paying the salaries of key personnel, especially drivers, is responsible for a great deal of the cost.

Salaries for top drivers are extremely high for a couple of reasons.

Big contracts reward both a driver's talent, which is essential to the success of his team, and also his marketability, which needs to attract huge sponsorship dollars.

Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are prime examples of drivers who possess both tremendous talent and marketability.

In 1978, I was driver and general manager of a fairly successful Cup team, which won three races, and finished fourth in the points standings.

That year our sponsor gave us $150,000, and we won just over $288,000.

So our budget was about $440,000 for that season.

In contrast, today a team that finishes fourth in the points standings will have a budget of between $15 and $18 million dollars.

Where we received $150,000 from sponsorships, today some teams get $15 million from sponsors.

The move to high tech
Engineering is a huge, huge cost nowadays.

Wind tunnel testing can run about $2,000 an hour, and each week the top operations will have a car in a wind tunnel, and in some weeks they may have two cars in wind tunnels.

Those cars will probably be in the wind tunnel for eight hours a day, that's $16,000 for a day for testing, and my guess is that some of the top teams will test two days a week for just about every week in the year.

Each crew chief wants to take his car to the wind tunnel, and see how it stacks up against the competition.

An expensive proposition to say the least.

Not quite cost conscious
The advantage today is that multi-car operations can share resources and personnel.

When I raced there may have been a total of 10 people on my car's team.

Now, it is four or five times that number on a team.

A race team is the worst business model in the world because in the quest to win, teams spend all the money they get.

The thinking is if they can afford to hire 10 engineers instead of five, they may get one idea out of the five additional engineers that will allow them to race around a track a tenth of a second faster, and thus be more competitive.

Fans flock to the sport
Next to the increase in the money involved in NASCAR racing, the second biggest change I've seen since I was driving for a living is the tremendous rise in the interest in NASCAR-style racing.

I think that's primarily because of televised races in the 1980s, a lot of them seen on ESPN from coast to coast.

Almost every week, you could find a stock-car race on television.

These telecasts make for a good show, cars racing around tracks at top speeds, bumper to bumper, side by side, sometimes wrecking, and other times making difficult passes.

The emotions of drivers on display, as well as the precision of the pit crews.

It all makes for good drama, good reality television.

Contributing to the popularity of the sport is that there is much more accessibility to NASCAR drivers than there is to athletes in other sports.

And drivers, whether they want to or not, have to be fan friendly because they are the face of their sponsor to the NASCAR public.

And no sponsor is going to give millions to a driver who alienates fans.

Sponsors want exposure, positive exposure, so drivers have to be personable and likeable with fans, and they can't be reclusive from them.