Former Team Owner “Understood Why” Rick Hendrick & Roger Penske Are Responsible for NASCAR’s Plight

In a recent podcast, former NASCAR team owner Tommy Baldwin spoke about owning a NASCAR team. According to him, it is really difficult, especially from a financial standpoint. Interestingly, he criticized the likes of Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske, Joe Gibbs Racing, and other big teams for NASCAR’s financial issues.

He said, “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.”

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“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.”

What else did he say about NASCAR and its financial problem?

Owing to this, he was glad that NASCAR was making decisions to try and keep everyone on the same page. As a result, we are now witnessing drivers from different teams challenging for wins or even winning races. What is special about this is that these are drivers from teams who you wouldn’t expect to see as a front-runner.

Since the introduction of the Next-Gen car and revamped technical rules, it has brought everyone back to square one. If NASCAR’s objective was to make the races unpredictable, then they succeeded. With the sport being a lot more strict in policing technical regulations, everyone has to tiptoe through races. The slightest anomaly could spell disaster for any team and driver.

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Poor old Brad Keselowski found this out the hard way. However, he is not the only one, as many teams and drivers have struggled with the transition from five lug nuts to a single lug nut. In fact, so many drivers have incurred penalties for losing wheels and had their crew chiefs ejected for a few races.