ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070161
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C10 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: AUTO RACING
DATELINE: CONCORD, N. C.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
It was the Friday afternoon of the Winston Cup weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and up in Mooresville, Lakeside Industrial Park was teeming with tourists.
The park might as well be called the NASCAR Winston Cup Industrial Park, because it is almost exclusively a place for stock car shops and racing-related products.
The traffic was bumper to bumper in some places. Even tour buses were rolling in as NASCAR fans wandered from one Winston Cup shop to another.
Most of the shops limited the tourists to their lobbies, where there usually is a show car and souvenirs for sale. But at Kranefuss-Haas Racing, fans could wander through not only the lobby, but through the assembly room as well - part of the shop's inner sanctum.
In modern Winston Cup racing, accessibility is often a reflection of how a team is doing in the championship points hunt. And this was a telltale sign of how Kranefuss-Haas Racing is doing.
The team is 32nd in owner points. It has had such an abysmal season, co-owner Michael Kranefuss agreed to switch drivers with Cale Yarborough after the Darlington race. John Andretti went to Yarborough; Jeremy Mayfield joined Kranefuss.
It would overstate the matter to say Kranefuss opened his shop simply because his team was doing poorly. He sometimes goes into the grandstands to talk with fans and gauge the pulse of the sport.
``You learn a lot just by talking to people who come to the track,'' he said during lunch at his shop.
Kranefuss is the former head of Ford's worldwide motorsports program. He had high expectations when he joined the sport at the beginning of the 1995 season. But his vast experience meant little when he moved from Michigan to North Carolina.
His first year wasn't too bad. Andretti finished 18th in points, finished fourth at Michigan and won the Southern 500 pole at Darlington Raceway.
But this year, Andretti failed to make the Bristol race in the spring and failed to finish 10 races, seven because of crashes.
Did Kranefuss ever reconsider his decision to leave the high-powered corporate world and go racing?
``About 20 times,'' he said. ``The whole thing came pretty close to collapsing. Monday mornings are the worst. It's when all the reality sets in.''
``Sunday evenings, too,'' said Kranefuss' wife, Emmy.
Kranefuss, a native of Germany, acknowledges that the cultural gap was larger than he expected when he came South. There were also huge communication problems between him, ex-crew chief Tim Brewer and Andretti.
``A lot of it is completely underestimating how important it is to have team spirit, camaraderie and chemistry,'' he said. ``But we didn't come here just to have a good time. We're a good-funded team and we've failed to turn this into success. With Jeremy, I think we'll be there.''
But that's not all that's been on Kranefuss' mind. He knows that hundreds of tourists visiting the park on a Friday is an example of how the sport is booming, and he wonders if NASCAR can properly control that growth.
``One thing that is not adequately dealt with is television,'' he said.
Each track currently negotiates its own television deals and contributes one quarter of the income to the race purse. Kranefuss believes NASCAR could do much better negotiating a television rights package. But there's not a lot of opportunity to make that point, he said.
``There's very little communication going on between us [car owners] and NASCAR,'' he said. ``It's not even a situation of `Let's sit down and discuss this, here's the plan.' There's a couple of guys they talk to - Richard Childress and Robert Yates. But not many beyond that.
``I think the series should at least be in a position to support 50 to 60 percent of the race expenses,'' he said. It costs his team from $130,000 to $150,000 to run each race, and even a top-10 finish nets only $20,000 to $30,000.
``The two most successful racing series in the world are Formula One and NASCAR. Both are dictatorships - Bernie Ecclestone in Formula One and Bill France in NASCAR. You cannot argue with that concept.
``But there's very little communication going on, and that is something I do not appreciate,'' he said. ``I have nothing but respect for France, but there's so much at stake. TV has gotten so much bigger, and I'd like to see a lot of people get involved.''
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB