Matt Breuer
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Great piece and 100% true. Have some similarities — it was the only sport that was “followed” in my family growing up, and certainly the only “pro” sport I ever went to as a kid… but otherwise I grew up in Northeast, went to an ivy and live in NYC. Won’t double town on your takeaways from tech — 100% agree and you’ve already linked to people who paint clearer illustrations than I would.

NASCAR feels… anachronistic. I’ve tried to share the sport with tons of people over the years but while I can convince people that it takes tremendous talent & engineering, it’s a lot harder to make it feel like a sport that is for them.

The sport has incredible personalities — I think there are few people trying harder to grow the image of the sport than Keselowski, the young crop of drivers are all pretty social and public… but it all feels like it happens within a bubble.

Some of that is proximity — for better or worse, there aren’t a lot of NASCAR tracks that are well-positioned, geographically, to grow the footprint of the sport. When you contrast that with the success a league like MLS has had in placing stadia in downtown areas and bringing tons of new diehard fans into the sport, it’s a difficult hill to climb. Vegas seems to achieve it — it makes me wonder what the impact would be of a road race on a city circuit.

But no matter how hard drivers work, or how the schedule/points/cars are changed, people aren’t going to stay if they don’t feel welcome. Any time I have this conversation, it feels like fans of the sport reject this “entitlement” — but the reality is that people just don’t join up and do things that they don’t feel welcome at, and when you compare NASCAR leadership and figureheads to almost every other sport… the demographics & time aren’t in your favor.

    Matt Breuer

    Written by

    Ollie, Yale College // I help companies grow, and just have opinions about everything else