The Warning Signs Were There For NASCAR

It just keeps getting uglier when it comes to the emails, texts, and messages being released from NASCAR leadership. Yet with these revelations I have noticed more of a pattern over time that doesn’t just involve the Steves, or even just Brian France but all the way back to the days of Bill France and Bill France, Jr. All of this adds to one continuous story with the same maddening throughline. The warning signs were there for NASCAR.

Matt Tifft’s Video:

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Outro Song: Strange Animal (Crowder Remix) by Gowan

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It’s Just A Burning Memory – The Caretaker

If it changes at the same rate, we won’t even recognize it from when I started. I remember 20 of us drivers went about, I don’t know, five years ago, maybe 6 years ago, and sat with NASCAR and and said, “These are the things that we think will help make the sport better.” and a person in NASCAR that I won’t name sat there and looked me square in the eye and said that everything that we were talking about and what I was saying was 180 degrees backwards from what they thought was going to fix it. Yeah. And and this is a guy that never worked on a race car, never driven a race car, that worked for an auto manufacturer that came in and all of a sudden he was smarter than everybody that’s ever been around the sport and driven race cars for 20 plus years. We knew going into this lawsuit that we would learn plenty about NASCAR and plenty that we probably didn’t want to know and also plenty that they didn’t want us to know. But we were warned both in the macro and the micro. In the micro, Judge Bell had warned that there would be no winners in this lawsuit. We would see losers from NASCAR, the teams, and most importantly, the fans. And the fans, make no mistake, will be the big losers in this lawsuit. The lawyers will win. The rich sides on both sides will be fine. we will be the ones left holding the bag. And it’s really starting to become real. It’s been an underlying story for the better part of 2025. The lawsuit and the points format. That’s all we’ve had talking about week to week. Continuing storylines, all of that. Well, here we go. We’re at the climax of this story. Techs now are beginning to drop from both sides. And it doesn’t help. It doesn’t make anyone look good. the teams look bad and we saw some of those. For instance, talking about NASCAR being better off if Jim France was dead. And now we’re seeing that on the other side from what NASCAR has said. Now, I get it. You know, there’s going to be people saying stuff in private when they don’t think anyone’s looking, when they don’t think anyone is going to see what they say. I guarantee we’ve said abhorrent things. I know I have before about people. And a lot of times I don’t even mean what I say. I’m just pissed in the moment. It’s easy to text it to somebody. That’s human. But when you’re leading a sport, when you are a a huge entity in a sport, you get held to a higher standard. And when those ugly warts come out into the sunlight, yeah, we’re going to be critical. 2311, for instance, shown to be a profit. They are. And and it’s different from a lot of what they’ve talked about so far. doesn’t make them look good in any way. On top of that, you have to look at again what they had said about Jim France, what the team owners have said about other team owners like Jeff Dickerson and how he’s talked to those in NASCAR and about others in NASCAR. The Richard Childress slander. I know there’s plenty that we can criticize Richard Childress on, but the disrespect from those in the industry towards him, people that should know who he is, the NASCAR family, as we are so often told they are. Yeah, I think they should hold to a higher standard about that than fans. Fans, it’s short for fanatic, and we can be fanatically stupid at times, and it’s happened. But hey, they’ve taken aim at us, too. They’ve called us rednecks. They’ve said we’re too stupid to read. Yeah. Not really seeing how we’re winning in this in any way. And I get how some people say, “Well, if you’re offended by it, what’s that say about you?” You know what? I think that people leading a giant business should look at their customers better. It explains a lot about how NASCAR has run. They think, and maybe some of us have proven them right, but they think we are useful idiots. They think we’re stupid and nothing has changed and nothing will change from that. The NASCAR leadership that we see is anything but leadership. The Steves, for instance, I mean, the stuff that they’re saying about the fan base, about the people in their sport, it all adds up. It adds up to something that NASCAR leadership has had since the very beginning. They have a god complex just as the France family has had since the beginning of the sport. Their little dictatorship we so often talk about with great stories. Well, there’s a lot from that history that’s been wiped away by the victors. And they didn’t have the internet back then to fight back like we do now. All of these texts and emails that people thought would never see the light of day. You know what? I’m glad they’re coming out. I’m glad we see how they view us, how they view the people in the sport that they work with, how they view themselves. I’m glad to see this happen because if this is how they’ve acted and viewed all of us, this is what they deserve. Now, I get some saying that this is normal, that this is how people talk behind the scenes and all of that, and I’ve talked about that a bit, but when I see Tommy Joe Martins, somebody that I have a lot of respect for, somebody who knows more about the industry than I probably ever will, and somebody who knows what it’s like to struggle, claw your way forward with small victories, say this that every text from anyone just confirms everything I’ve felt for 10 plus years. It’s not a disappointment to see it all. It’s a relief. I wasn’t just dreaming it up. It was actually happening. And you know what? That speaks more to me than anything that somebody in the sport knew that the house in a lot of ways might not have been rigging it against them. But you know what? with what they said about the smaller teams and what they said about how it’s basically like keeping them on welfare and looking down on them. Yeah, that speaks a whole lot more than any of those rich folks at 2311 or Front Row or NASCAR could ever. But this again exposes more of the underbelly of NASCAR to the fans. And for the longest time, and it might be hard for people to imagine this now, but for the longest time, NASCAR was able to sell the lie that they were the clean family sport. And even back to 2009 with the Jeremy Mayfield deal, that’s why it was so shocking at the time before we knew any of the facts. They literally were saying on the broadcast that this is a family sport. This is a sport that is above what the NFL always deals with and the NBA and the stick and ball sport that we are above this. What an amazing lie that was. I see some saying that this doesn’t matter. That the fans getting mad on X or like me on YouTube or on Reddit, we don’t matter because we are not the bigger picture. We are just a small little snippet of the fan base and most the fans won’t see it. But here’s the thing. You’re missing the bigger picture. You might not think that we are, but one, the social media platforms that all of this is going out on, this is the public square. This is where we’re all coming together to talk about this and it expands from there. I I get it that yeah, maybe a video of mine with 30,000 views doesn’t speak for the larger fan base of NASCAR, but I can tell you a bunch of people’s views, they add up over time. I also think that it’s just saying to secondly, not just the fans, but the industry is seeing this. And yeah, they might have wondered or some of them might not have seen that full picture. But at this point now, the veil is off. They see it. And three, this is further hurting the dieh hard base. The base that has stuck through all of the that they’ve put us through. The diehard base that has defended this sport. And now for some of us like myself feel more alienated by the sport than we ever have. And I’m sorry, they need a voice, too. They need to be able to vent this frustration. And I I I like that this is coming out. We needed this to come out as a fan base because to me, this is rock bottom. This is where we need to really have some kind of real change and growth in the sport. And not because they’re reacting to the SRX’s six weeks of racing, not because a big name said something, not because a lawsuit pushed them to do it because it was mandatory to change in some ways based on the situation. But now we’re not just hitting rock bottom. We are diving into the bedrock at this point. It’s time to bounce up. It’s time to change things. But this has not been something that just popped up. This has been rolling down the road for a long time, long before the lawsuit was even dreamt up of. That clip of Tony Stewart I showed you at the beginning of this video, that was from 2018. That was nearly 8 years ago. And Tony has his own problems. But let’s be real here. Just about everything he said, everything he warned about in his last years in NASCAR has come home to roost. And speaking of Jeremy Mayfield I talked about earlier in 2009 he was basically banned forever from NASCAR. Even though he was allowed to come back in if he wanted at some point the damage done to his reputation was set. There was no repairing that by the time he could competitively race again, only to find out that a majority of the charges and accusations against him were falsified or doctorred or there were just major discrepancies in it. Over time, he really hasn’t been found to have been guilty of all that many things. NASCAR was more or less corrupt. They made a mockery and a statement out of him. And yes, I know that there was stuff outside of NASCAR that could have further pushed the case that they had, but when you look back at him talking on Dale Jr. download, it seems like a lot of that stuff was connected to the France family a little bit. Just saying. NASCAR has plenty of influence when it comes to North Carolina. They had even more back then. Corruption is impossible to ignore. It’s been going on forever, but it’s been easy to ignore. But look back, it’s not just Brian France or Jim France. It’s Bill France. It’s Bill France Jr. from Mayfield to Tim Richmond basically being proven to have been screwed out of the last bit of his career that he could really have based on purposefully failed and doctorred drug tests against him. Look at Tallaladega in 1969 where they just ripped up the rule book at a whim. Look at the very beginning. Lee Petty lost a championship because the Frances were too overbearing with their rules that you couldn’t race any series but NASCAR. And now you look at the way the Steves are talking about how the drivers and teams need to have loyalty to the sport and they need to put a knife in another series and you realize that nothing since the late 40s has really changed in how this sport is run. It is a god complex and with that they view themselves above what any contributions have been done to the sport by anyone else. Look at all of the slander and all of the bad mouthing at Richard Childress. Richard Childress, again, you can disagree with a lot of things. You can have a lot of things you can say against him, but you cannot deny that Richard Childris helped build NASCAR to what it is today. The money they make today is in large part off the back of Richard Childress and Dale Nhard. Now, how does this all come together, though? How does this all matter? Is it just me bitching to Maybe. But for any dieards and a ton of those that are paying attention, the leadership looks worse and worse. Brian France was enabled by the previous regime before him. And those he put in place are still here making a mess today. And the teams, they’re not innocent either. They have had their own problems like we’ve pointed out. But the worst part is twofold here. This is only going to get worse as a lawsuit progresses and then as the internet always does and a few weeks after we’re not even going to really talk about it. It’s just going to simmer under the surface again waiting for the next flare up. I hope I’m wrong and I hope major changes are made. But at this point, it’s hard to ignore. And at this point, I just I had to say a little something cuz all of this connects in a lot of ways for me. And you see the reaction that older drivers and industry members are having to this. And it’s damning. It’s really damning. I just hope the fans don’t lose too much in this. So, thank you guys so much for watching and listening. And uh have a great day. Later. That’s what I know. I know.