Editor's Note: Ben Blake is a long-time racing reporter and commentator known for his honest, perceptive and irreverent commentary. He started covering NASCAR and motorsports in 1982 with The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch and later spent 10 years as chief NASCAR editor for Racer magazine and for SpeedTV. He is author or co-author of five NASCAR-related books, including Dale Earnhardt: Determined, the authorized biography of Dale Earnhardt.Well, I've been watching Brian France again lately, and heaven still my pen.
I haven't paid much attention to Brian in the four or so years since I came off full-time NASCAR beat coverage, but he still strikes me the same way ? an arrogant punk with the smug look of someone born on third base thinking he hit a triple.
Brian (right), current chief officer of NASCAR, just doesn't seem to have focus and grip on the huge product he inherited, third-generation scion of the France clan of motorsport moguls. Sure, he played a large part in developing NASCAR's network-television packages in 2000, and for that we'll give him some credit. On the other hand, he's responsible for that abortion called The Chase to the Sprint Cup championship, and other mental breakdowns.
Funny thing though: Scribes older than I, ones who came to the game when founder Big Bill France was unquestioned Big Chief, thought pretty much the same of little Billy France -- William C. France, or Bill France "Jr." -- who was given the controls in 1972, when his father, Big Bill, decided to back away. Billy (left) was 38 when he ascended to the throne, about the same age as Brian was when Bill Jr. stepped aside in 2003.
Billy was an arrogant punk, the old hands said, a smart-a**ed kid who got the job through the lineage rather than through any demonstrated aptitude.
Moreover, the old man had bequeathed to his son the beginnings of a series sponsorship, from R.J. Reynolds, which over its 33-year lifetime grew to multimillions of dollars annually and pretty much kept the game alive during the cruel years following the Detroit pull-outs of 1970 and 1971 and the OPEC oil embargo in 1973-74.
Billy was well into his term by the time I came along, and gradually, as I worked amid his handiwork, I developed greater and greater respect for the man. Always a careful watcher of media, Bill and I became familiar to each other, and in a professional way, became friends.
A caveat: Bill wasn't on good terms with everyone in his orbit. Junior Johnson, who helped broker the RJR transaction at the beginning, never had much use for him. Neither did rival mogul Bruton Smith. Jack Roush learned quickly that France could be autocratic, arbitrary, and downright unfair at times, but Jack was wise enough to adjust to what he called "the benevolent dictatorship." Many who rubbed Bill the wrong way saw him as uncompromising, even dismissive.
I'm sure he treated the press differently than he did those whose decisions affected his business. He could lean on us hard, but he could take it, and appreciate it, when we gave it back to him.
I walked up to France and Jim Hunter (the late NASCAR Vice President of Communications) in the garage at Richmond once. France greeted me with one of his put-you-off comments: "Ah, here's the guy who gets all his facts inaccurate."
I rolled my eyes and said, "Bill, I'm not inaccurate. I just make it up." Hunter about fell out laughing. France began to sputter, then grinned.
One of my favorite France memories came at Darlington in 1992. Candidate Bill Clinton, running for president, had come to Darlington to curry favor from what even then had become a voting monolith, "the NASCAR fan." Sunday morning, Clinton went down the line of cars on pit road, attempting to greet the drivers. France and I were in the almost-vacant garage.
We leaned on the fenders of one of the Winston-red trucks parked by the NASCAR headquarters trailer, just breezing and chatting. Suddenly, a crowd of Secret Service swept by, with candidate Clinton as part of the entourage, and all went up into the hauler, apparently to meet NASCAR's officials.
France, an ardent Republican and influential in Florida Republican politics, scarcely raised an eyelid and kept talking with me. I nodded toward the trailer and said, "Bill, isn't there something you need to be doing?"
France waved the air idly. "Nah," he said. "I'll get to him later."
Yep, I can say Bill France snubbed Bill Clinton to talk to me.
Big Bill, the patriarch, was all threat and bluster and corruption, and he had to be to make NASCAR go. He was in charge of some of the roughest, most individual men ever to turn in circles, and it took a large, strong, loud boss, a Jimmy Hoffa, to assemble this crew and compel them to compete under his regulations. The phrase, "conduct detrimental to NASCAR," became part of the lexicon very early on, and it pretty much covered anything that challenged Big Bill's concept of how the sport would be run.
"I knew where every car was every lap of the race, because I'm the president of NASCAR."
-- The late Bill France, Jr.
Billy France was quieter, but he absorbed the big picture early. His native ability was in administration, and he carefully grew with the product as it took off in the 1980s, with Detroit returning at full speed, and with national product sponsorships covering the cars.
France assembled the parts into an intricate masterpiece, a huge structure involving competitors, race tracks, sponsoring companies, auto companies, suppliers, etc. There were other parts of the France empire that went back decades and had nothing to do with NASCAR.
Roger Penske's employees like to say that the Captain "knows where the light switches are." The same could be said of France, who with a five-minute phone call to the right person could set in motion some part of the immense machinery he controlled and cause some great thing to happen, some serious problem to be resolved.
France also adroitly managed the bizarre relationship of NASCAR and International Speedway Corporation, created by his father and transformed in the 1980s as a publicly-traded company which owned and controlled 12 speedways by the turn of the millennium. NASCAR, or course, remained a closely-held, private company, and France, well-versed in SEC regulations, knew where the lines crossed and should never cross.
Like his father, though, Bill Jr. refused to be pushed around or to allow any questions about who was in charge.
After the death of crewman Mike Rich in a pit accident at Atlanta at the end of 1990, NASCAR in 1991 tried several foolish expedients to try to remedy the problem of crowded pit roads. One such device split the field into odd and even numbered cars, allowing the odd cars to pit one the first lap of caution and the evens on the second, or something.
The result, at Darlington in the spring, was complete and total confusion, for both the competitors and the customers. The next week, a couple of us found France near the Goodyear building and pulled him aside for questions. "Did you honestly know what was going on last week at Darlington?" my colleague asked.
France squared up and looked us in the eyes. "Sure I did," he said evenly. "I knew where every car was every lap of the race, because I'm the president of NASCAR."
What more could we say?
Bill was diagnosed with cancer in 2000 -- prostate cancer, insiders confided, denying rumors of lung cancer. Bill was a heavy smoker. The year prior, 1999, he ceded the day-to-day operation of NASCAR to Mike Helton. And when Helton formally replaced France as president in November 2000, much was made of the fact that a non-France now was in charge of the cartel.
What we didn't immediately get was that France was dividing the front office. The CEO's job had become just too much for any man. France chose Helton to handle the day-to-day running of NASCAR, the racing organization. Brian remained in the wings to take over duties as CEO, which he did late in 2003.
One thing you always knew about Bill was that he knew the sport, all the nuts and bolts -- his mind was like Smokey Yunick's warehouse. As a teenager, he nailed up handbills for events at Martinsville. He scored races. He was competition director/promoter for the last of the Beach races in the mid-1950s. He knew Fonty Flock and Marshall Teague.
Brian? Oh, he was listed as promoter or something at a one-time NASCAR property in Tucson, but I don't think he's ever gotten his hands dirty. Billy could dig potatoes. Brian gets his off the menu. Connect and disconnect.
France began his long, slow fade from the scene as treatment began (France, by the way, paid his medical expenses, refusing to accept government money although eligible for Medicare). For two or three years, he remained out of sight, and when he began returning to races, he looked very different, his face jowly and swollen, much of his hair gone, needing help with transport, and not a cigarette in sight.
The few times I saw him after that, well, he was still Bill. But having given up all but emeritus and advisory control of the company he'd brought into the 21st century, France accepted what amounted more to honorary attention than to corporate deference. He died in Daytona Beach in June 2007.
Bill was fond of ribald sayings and riddles. One of his favorites was this: The farther the monkey goes up the tree, the smaller his a**hole seems to be. By that he meant that the further into the future one looked, the less clear was the view.
Maybe, one of these days, we'll begin to see what sort of vision Brian, now 48, has for the future of the product, and what he's done and will do will begin to make sense. Maybe we'll begin to see that he does, after all, know where the light switches are.
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