Former NASCAR team owner Tommy Baldwin spoke about the financial difficulties of owning a NASCAR team due to other big teams.
When we think of the NASCAR Cup Series, the likes of Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske, and Joe Gibbs Racing come to mind first. After all, they are the team that generally gets the most wins and end up winning the championship more often than not. And to come in as a new team owner to find oneself in the difficulty of not being able to compete with these teams both financially and on the race track must be a hard feeling.
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Speaking about this inequality in NASCAR, Baldwin highlighted the struggles of the new team.
“I was in a lot of meetings with the charter stuff happening. Sitting down with Mr Hendrick, Roger, Richard… I was in a lot of those high meetings. I understood why our sport got to where we got pretty quick. On how it got too expensive and these guys were just racing each other.”
“These owners, all they’ve done in the last 15 years, is race each other to win races. They built all these big places and hired all these people for all this money. And they ran themselves pretty much out of the garages, with the high cost of what we’re doing.”
But with the introduction of the Next-Gen cars, NASCAR is taking efforts to get everyone on the same page. And it is encouraging to see a number of drivers from various teams taking wins, making it an even better competition.