NASCAR and its teams remain at a standstill in the charter negotiations that have been going on for months now. The current agreement ends at the end of the 2024 season and neither party has thus far been satisfied with the offers and demands of the other. RFK Racing co-owner Brad Keselowski believes, at this juncture, that the new deal when finalized will provide a better balance for teams in terms of funding.
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In a recent conversation with reporter Bob Pockrass, he mentioned how teams had to rely on sponsors for 90% of the required funds and on outside revenue for 10%, 20 years back. In today’s world, that funding ratio has become somewhere close to 75% on sponsors and 25% on other sources. He expressed that the new deal will balance this scale even further.
His words went, “It appears the new charter agreement is going to get that somewhere closer to 65-35, which is a shift that can’t be understated. But the reality of that is it still doesn’t fully flip the script so to speak. It’s just a step in the right direction.” Though it is a promising step, the teams haven’t been convinced enough by it and are demanding more.
Keselowski himself talked about the reasons for the dissatisfaction in a discussion with Kevin Harvick recently. He said that even well-managed teams were losing money under the current financial model of NASCAR and put the blame on inflation. “I think just inflation itself has been the killer,” he said. “And so, that drives the charter negotiation.”
“Because teams are just screaming like we have a huge deficit with our budgets. And so, that kind of puts the whole charter negotiation in a unique place where the teams are just thinking ‘How are we gonna pay for this?”
At the bottom of this entire ordeal are the teams wanting to rely on sponsors as little as they can. The bigger the revenue share they get from NASCAR, the less dependent they will be.
The RFK Racing topman concluded to Harvick, “At the end of the day, the conversation is mostly about how do we create a stable platform where the teams aren’t losing money.” Hopefully, common ground will be reached soon with the clock winding up fast.
