NASCAR & Diversity: Is It Necessary To Compete As a Major Market Sport?

She hasn’t competed in any stock car race, yet we can already see the unintended consequence of Danica Patrick coming to NASCAR.

One has to look no further then the Bleacher Report headline board and see there are two or three stories about other young female race car drivers.

I make a twice a day scan through the Bleacher Report NASCAR pages , there is usually not many stories about female drivers.

In this age of the digital media and the meteoric spread of information, someone like Danica Patrick can certainly get people talking “fast and furiously”

She has already done that!

I think it would be safe to say there are many little girls asking their daddy’s about what Danica Patick does for a living.

That is how barriers are broken, someone gets the conversation going and Danica has clearly done that.

Let me give you an example of this, from 1852 to 1954 (over 100 years) no one had been able to break the four minute mile.

In 1954 Roger Bannister became the first to break that barrier, here is the amazing part, within the next ten years six different runners broke the records.

All diversity needs is just one person to prove they can do it, and it becomes like an avalanche, unstoppable.

Here is the amazing part, she has yet to do anything in NASCAR!

Yet, It’s a good bet that there is more talk about her coming to NASCAR than Jimmie Johnson winning four championships.

Just Google her name and then Google Jimmie Johnson’s name, take a look at the upper right hand corner of the page, you will notice JJ has 2,520,000 results and Danica has about a 3,5000,000 count.

That figure just amazes me, JJ has won four championships and Patrick has won one race.

Just goes to show you the power of an image.

If one believes (as I do) NASCAR needs to become more diverse to keep competing as a major market sport, like her or not, you must agree Danica Patrick could help NASCAR achieve that.

It would be naïve to think NASCAR only needs their fan base to keep this sport at it’s current level, that is not going to get it done this day and age, they need to shake things up.

NASCAR needs to find a more diverse fan fallowing, lets just say “they need to find other acts for this circus, and sooner rather than later.

If fan diversity is not achieved, economics may force this sport to end up with 10 power teams, with four cars each, in other words nine Hendrick clones, just take a look at Formula 1 and see how much fun racing is when you got a structure similar to a traveling circus.

The point is that even if you hate Danica or Montoya or other drivers who are coming up the pipe who do not fit the image that has been the main stay of NASCAR since it’s birth, you should still support it, they are important if this sport is to keep moving forward.

There has been hundreds of layoff and many sponsors are cutting back, but guess what! those sponsors are still spending money, and just like everyone of us , there’re just looking for the most bang for their buck.

It’s up to the sport to present a product that becomes a “most have” to sponsors.

It doesn’t take a Harvard degree to figure that out, now doest it.