With NASCAR’s premier event, the Daytona 500, slated to run this Sunday at the Daytona International Speedway, it would seem appropriate to consider the thoughts of one of the sport’s most intriguing characters and one of its greatest promoters regarding the state of modern-day racing. Particularly for this website, these comments are noteworthy because they pertain to short-track racing and how it contrasts with the more lucrative and prolific side of American stock car competition.
Humpy Wheeler
It does not take an expert to see that NASCAR has experienced a significant drop off in both attendance at its tracks and the ratings for its television broadcasts over the past decade. At the same time, short track racing, including the racing done on clay surfaces, has seen large crowds inhabit its special events and even some weekly shows.
In an interview shown on the television program Three Wide Life aired by Fox Sports Southeast, H.A. ‘Humpy’ Wheeler discussed the decline of racing at the NASCAR level in terms of attendance and why he believes short-track racing has not seemingly suffered the same type of drop off as the much more exposed asphalt racing series.
Many of the views expressed by Wheeler within this interview are consistent with those expressed by Michael Moats and myself numerous times on this website. However, it was considered that these statements coming from a person with such vast experience would carry considerable weight.
Wheeler’s experience in the sport of racing is extensive. He was first drawn to the sport as an 8-year-old boy living in Belmont, NC. He then went from selling sodas at the old Charlotte Speedway to serving as the promoter at Charlotte Motor Speedway, home to one of NASCAR’s premier events, the World 600(Coca-Cola 600).
“As soon as I saw those brightly colored race cars, I was hooked,” Wheeler told the Three Wide Life interviewer. “The guys who raced the cars were characters, they were bigger than life. Junior Johnson was a bootlegger and Curtis Turner, God knows what he did.”
After attending the University of South Carolina, Wheeler got his first real taste of promoting when he took over a quarter-mile track located in Gastonia, NC. There, the up-and-coming promoter learned the tricks of the trade that would make him successful in that business over the course of a long career.
“We charged $1.50 to get in,” Wheeler explained. “Our first race, the place was packed and the second race was packed. By the third race, instead of 12 cars, we had 65. It just really went on.”
That track was eventually shut down because of the traffic congestion it was causing. “After that we built the Carolina Speedway(a dirt track that is still in operation in Gastonia),” Wheeler added. “But after I did that for about five years, I figured out I needed to get to the big time so I went to work for Firestone and eventually became the Director of Racing for Firestone. I was involved with Indy Cars, sports cars, F1 and the whole deal. That really opened my eyes up to the rest of the world.”
That experience paved the way for Wheeler’s understanding of all facets of racing, short-track and otherwise. Furthermore, he developed a keen sense for the cycles that all sports tend to go through, including racing on all levels.
“All sports that become a national sport go through a ten to twelve year cycle of at least 15% growth a year,” he explained.
Wheeler went on to point out that the NFL went through a cycle beginning in the late 1950s and baseball did it during the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s.
“Once you go through that twelve to fourteen year growth period, you plateau out,” Wheeler continued. “If you’re like the NBA, you sit there for a while then all of a sudden here comes Michael Jordan, and boom, it shot up again.”
And that applies to NASCAR and all forms of racing as well.
“Something has to become a catalyst for growth again,” the 78-year-old pointed out. “The problem is we’re(NASCAR) sitting on this plateau and have been for seven years. It takes a sensational personality to move it, a sensational change. You’ve got to be willing to change to get off that plateau. Sport, in general, is so tradition bound and not willing to change for their own good.”
At this point in the interview, Wheeler begins to distinguish the difference in the current direction of NASCAR and that of short track racing.
“So what are going to have to do in racing?” he asked rhetorically. “I think we’re going to have to make some changes on the NASCAR level to make it better. And we’re certainly going to have to change on the short track level, which is where my interests lay now. No matter what I’m doing, if I’ve got a free night, I’m going to go to a short track. That’s where fun racing is and it’s kind of the way racing used to be. We’ve seen some tracks where they have full houses, even out in the boondocks.”
According to Wheeler, short track racing gives fans what they have been missing from other forms of the sport.
“People are going to the short tracks because they want to see what racing was really like twenty years ago,” he insisted. “There’s just a lot of color and drama on those short tracks that we’ve lost(in NASCAR). Hopefully that will come back. But without the backbone, and that’s the short tracks, the big tracks will suffer.”
Wheeler believes that the lack of color and drama in NASCAR is having an impact on both that form of racing and the local tracks.
From my own personal experience, I can attest to what Wheeler is saying. In 2016 I attended over 50 dirt track events. On six different occasions at five different tracks the announcement was made that the crowd on hand was the biggest in the history of each of those particular facilities. And at the same time, I watched a significant number of NASCAR races on television and could see large empty spaces in the grandstands surrounding those tracks.
“On the other hand, this is the first time in history where we’re seeing significant attendance drops with big tracks and not so much the short tracks.”
Click here to check out Part II of this series.
