NACAR CEO Brian France has seen the sport he runs explode in popularity throughout the United States. While he sees dollar signs flying, he also watches the Confederate flag flapping in the wind at many races. He knows it’s not only offensive, it is costing his sport money.
“It’s not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure,” France told Lesley Stahl last Sunday on 60 Minutes.
He copped out a bit by saying, “I can’t tell people what flag to fly. I can tell you the flag we get behind: It’s the American flag.”
But France has to be praised for going national with his disgust for the flag of traitors and torturers of black Union Army soldiers.
NASCAR generates more than $3 billion in annual revenue and is labeled as America’s fastest-growing sport. While growing throughout the nation, the sports’ roots are in the Deep South, from the days when bootleggers took their runs to dirt tracks for prize money. This was a sport created in the time of Klansmen and separatists and in a land where black people were often lynched or persecuted for nothing more than the color of their skin.
France knows that big ratings don’t mean the biggest dollars. If the sport is to rack up NFL kind of money, appealing to minorities is a must. That flag has to go if NASCAR wants to become popular in places like Los Angeles or New York
“[Reaching out to minorities] is something I work on every day. I work on it personally,” he said during the show.
Among those efforts France has pursued are the running of a NASCAR event in Mexico and establishing a training program for female and minority drivers.
He said that Northerners image of NASCAR as being a “good old boy” sport is “a fading image,” but that will not be true until the Confederate flag is banned from tracks and finally fades into history.