NASCAR’s last (mainstream) American heroes

It’s been two weeks since Martin Truex Jr. announced his retirement from full-time NASCAR Cup Series competition, which will bring his illustrious, certainly Hall-of-Fame-worthy career to an end at the end of the 2024 season.

Pending any truly shocking Silly Season developments, this will mean that in 2025 there will remain only two active full-time drivers who competed in the 2006 season – the year of peak NASCAR, at least according to television viewers. It was the heyday of stock car racing before the recession, the few years when NASCAR was the second most popular spectator sport in America and medium-high highways were wiped out across the country and beyond (England and Germany even got in on the action).

Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were household names. Even if you didn’t follow racing, you’d seen them on TV commercials and billboards, as cardboard cutouts at K-Mart and printed on cans of your favorite soda.

Of the gladiators from stock car racing’s Imperial era, only Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin now remain – with Jimmie Johnson, not yet suited up to his Next Gen Toyota, in a part-time supporting role.

At first glance this does not seem to be a problem. For every Kasey Kahne who quit, we got a Ryan Blaney back. As promised (perhaps a little too early) by FOX Sports’ 2018 marketing campaign, the young players waged war against the old guard – and prevailed. Because no matter how fast Matt Kenseth or Kurt Busch could be, they couldn’t outrun Father Time.

The new generation of Cup Series superstars is no less talented and personable than the titans of two decades ago. The margin from first to 36th is as close as it has ever been. The breadth of talent in the Cup Series right now is staggering. But the thing is, if you were walking down Main Street in almost any city in America (maybe not Mooresville or Indianapolis) and randomly approached someone and asked them to name a driver, they would probably say, “Dale Earnhardt Jr.” ” or “Jeff Gordon.”

(Okay, to be fair, a lot of them would say “Ricky Bobby” in reference to Talladega nightsa film that came out in – wait for it – 2006.)

Earnhardt and Gordon are well-deserved Hall of Famers, the most popular drivers from the most popular era of stock car racing. Their names, numbers and sponsors are known to anyone who sets foot in an antique store south of Mason-Dixon. But they have both been retired for almost a decade. Their memorabilia is inside antique shops.

When superstar drivers like Gordon—or Truex—retire, their legions of fans have a choice to make. Many switch allegiances. On X (formerly Twitter), I’ve seen longtime Truex fans announce plans to support Christopher Bell or Chase Briscoe once MTJ hangs up the helmet in recent weeks.

But – as the TV ratings from Chase Elliott’s six-race sabbatical in 2023 suggest – sometimes fans give up on the sport altogether.

NASCAR is not a team sport. While yes, some people choose Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing as the focus of their fandom, Bill France has de facto set the rule book. For more than 70 years, we’ve known that the stars of NASCAR are the drivers. It is inevitable that these stars will age.

If I had a perfect answer to the question of why NASCAR declined in popularity after 2006, I probably wouldn’t write it in a column for Anterior stretch – I would probably book myself a meeting in one of those big office towers in Charlotte or Daytona Beach. But the long, slow bleeding of fans who followed NASCAR for Bobby Labonte, Mark Martin, Carl Edwards or Kevin Harvick has meant that even maintaining viewership is essentially a game to win over new fans. Not only is NASCAR trying to convince those strangers on Main Street USA to become Kyle Larson fans, it’s also trying to win over those people who are technically NASCAR fans, but really just Harvick fans, who were rooting in return for Larson until November of last year.

We’re just a few years — and two inevitable retirement announcements — away from losing our last link to the days when NASCAR was by appointment in front of tens of millions of viewers, the last of the big names whose names and faces were in commercials that appeared on every channel were broadcast. channel, not just in the middle of the races. The last mainstream American heroes.

The last gasp of the boom momentum is coming to an end, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It’s not like NASCAR could or should have forced Gordon to race into his 60s. After his retirement he did good work in the commentary field and a Awesome job as a manager at Hendrick. But it’s harder to be an active Gordon fan when he is not driving.

Busch and Hamlin have one lot of fans.

For my parents’ generation, one name was synonymous with driving race cars fast: Mario Andretti. Yes, he won everywhere from NASCAR to Formula 1, but Andretti was the face of the NTT IndyCar Series. My generation usually doesn’t know who Scott Dixon is. When Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc announce their retirement in fifteen years’ time, the next generation is unlikely to attract the same attention from 40-year-old Gen Z-er F1 fans.

I’d really like to end with a solution here, and “well, just focus on how good the racing is” doesn’t work for me. We should take solace in the fragmented media landscape of the 2020s and the fact that an infrastructure exists to connect viewers to even the most niche sports properties. Suppose NASCAR loses a large portion of Busch and Hamlin fans. We’ll still be able to watch the sport we love, and the next generation of expecting superstars will still have the chance to show off their skills.

But what if any of them want to be the next Gordon: not just a winning driver, but the NASCAR driver whose name everyone knows? That’s another story.