Brad Keselowski believes that NASCAR will continue to increase the costs for teams to operate each year. While appearing on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast, Keselowski explained why NASCAR won’t get cheaper to operate.
“Nothing gets cheaper. Nothing ever gets cheaper,” Keselowski said. “…If you look at headcounts in the teams, the headcounts went down generally 10-20 percent. The problem is inflation hit everybody by another 20, so you kind of nullified all those gains, and then the car costs more.
“By the time you’re done, it’s more money. But I don’t know if it’s necessarily fair to blame that on the Next Gen car. I honestly think the Next Gen car itself was a wash between the difference of third-party vs. internal manufacturing. I think just inflation itself has been the killer here.”
Keselowski also talked about NASCAR not getting cheaper isdriving the charter negotiations. “The teams are just screaming we have a huge deficit with our budgets,” he said. “That kind of puts the whole charter negotiation in this unique place where the teams are trying to figure out how are we going to pay for things. The new TV martket, that’s almost changing every day, has kind of put another wrench in that because the more we move off of broadcasts and we move to streaming services and all these other things, the harder it is to get the partners engaged the way we want to get them engaged.
Brad Keselowski wants well-managed teams to not lose money
“But that comes at a tradeoff because now there’s more money. The streaming services pay the teams or NASCAR more money, and that transcends all the way down to the teams or passes through. …At the end of the day, the conversation is mostly about how do we create a stable platform to where the teams aren’t losing money, specifically how teams that are well-managed don’t lose money. There are well-managed teams that are losing money, and that’s a problem.”
Keselowski’s comments come as Stewart-Haas Racing is shutting its doors at the end of the season. Haas is going to reamin in NASCAR Cup Series as a single-car organization called Haas Factory Team.In a statement, Haas said, “My commitment to motorsports hasn’t changed, just the scope of my involvement. Operating a four-car Cup Series team has become too arduous but, at the same time, I still need a platform to promote Haas Automation and grow HaasTooling.com.”
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