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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A Q. & A. with Kevin Conley
William Clifton France, the seventy-year-old patriarch of the family that owns nascar, the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing, is not the richest man in sports: Paul Allen, Mark Cuban, and Wayne Huizenga, all of whom bought athletic teams after becoming wealthy, have more money. France, however, is the richest man from sports. His personal fortune, estimated by Forbes to be a billion dollars, comes entirely from auto racing. Bill, Jr., as he is known, would rather not say that he owns nascar--he prefers to say that he is the ''steward'' of the sport--but the distinction is lost on most people. The sport could go on without France and his family, but only if they sold it.
And why would they? nascar, second only to football in television ratings, has a $2.4-billion broadcast contract through 2006. Thirty-six weekends a year, its premier racing series, the Winston Cup, brings an average of a hundred thousand people to the track. In 2002, seventeen of the country's twenty most highly attended sporting events were Winston Cup races. Big cities, including New York, are clamoring to be chosen for Winston Cup weekends, which bring in anywhere from twenty-five million dollars for races in the rural Carolinas to more than two hundred million for events in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.
Despite its size, nascar remains unquestionably a family business. In January, Bill, Jr., and his two children, Brian France and Lesa France Kennedy, showed up in Concord, North Carolina, to promote nascar's latest project: a ten-million-dollar, sixty-one-thousand-square-foot research center that will help devise new safety measures for stock cars (and police the tendency among racing teams to cheat a little bit under the hood). At the press event, which was held on a platform stage inside one of the center's enormous garages, Bill, Jr., sat quietly in the front row of the audience, next to Lesa, who is forty-two. She is the president of International Speedway Corporation, which owns nearly half the tracks on the Winston Cup circuit; she reports to Jim France, the C.E.O. of I.S.C., who is Bill, Jr.,'s brother and a fellow-billionaire. Several feet away was forty-year-old Brian, nascar's executive vice-president and vice-chairman. He sat on the stage, watching the video presentation and waiting for his turn to speak. On paper, Lesa's employer and Brian's are separate entities--the former is publicly traded and the latter privately held. But I.S.C. and nascar share headquarters in Daytona Beach, Florida. Both companies have named Lesa, Brian, and Jim to their boards of directors. And Bill, Jr., holds the same position in each: chairman of the board.
Bill, Jr., was making his first appearance in public since undergoing open-heart surgery last fall. At the racetrack, he favors colorful Versace silk shirts; at the gathering in Concord, he looked muted, wearing a blue blazer, a black turtleneck, and sensible shoes. His skin was sallow, his hair had thinned, and his breathing was labored; blinking behind his bifocals, he watched the video presentation.
Brian then took the podium, and a slide projection of two maps of the United States appeared. One highlighted states with nascar races in 1985--a cluster down in Dixie--and the other showed last year's tally: big gains in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the West. Brian said, with careful vagueness, that this progress would continue, thanks to an initiative called "Realignment 2004 and Beyond." Brian is generally credited with the tremendous growth of nascar's merchandising arm, which now brings in two billion dollars a year from sales of seat cushions, walking canes, mud flaps, and similar items. He's not much of an orator, however. Brian tends to rely on buzzwords like "retail activation" and "diversity component," and his speech had the audience in a torpor.
Suddenly, Bill, Jr., stood up. "Let me help Brian out a little bit," he said. Somebody scurried over to hand him a microphone. Bill, Jr., explained the realignment in much blunter terms, singling out four hallowed tracks in Georgia and the Carolinas that weren't selling enough tickets. He threatened to move these race dates to larger markets next year. ''This is a good opportunity to take an asset that is underperforming and take it somewhere else,'' he said. His voice was stern and commanding. "The one advantage I've had laying there in a hospital bed is I'm watching a lot of television,'' he said. ''And I don't like to see a whole lot of empty seats!" Brian listened awkwardly to his father for a few moments; looking chastened, he returned to his seat.
Bill, Jr.,'s aggressive remarks in Concord set the tone for a year in which nascar has eagerly abandoned the symbols of its Southern past. The Frances dumped the sport's primary sponsor for thirty-one years, the R. J. Reynolds tobacco company; in 2004, the Winston Cup becomes the nascar Nextel Cup Series. In addition, nascar booted the Southern 500 out of its traditional slot, on Labor Day weekend, and replaced it with a race at a new track in California.
Bill, Jr., is an American hybrid: the second-generation self-made man. In 1972, at the age of thirty-eight, he inherited a nearly broke tobacco-belt sport from his dad, Big Bill France, and turned that modest claim into an empire. Although he knows kings, presidents, C.E.O.s, and movie stars, he is not impressed by glamour. Left to himself, he's a profane and down-to-earth old salt who likes to ride on his powerboat, fish, and eat hot dogs.
A few weeks after the event in Concord, Bill, Jr., agreed to meet with me in Daytona Beach, where he lives with his wife, Betty Jane. Soon after arriving in town, I learned that Bill,...
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