Should Hendrick Motorsports have put Anthony Alfredo back in the driver’s seat?
Earlier this week, Hendrick Motorsports announced that past NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series champion Justin Allgaier will be in the driver’s seat of the No. 48 this weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, as Alex Bowman is still recovering from complications with vertigo. It’s worth asking whether Hendrick made the right call here.
Allgaier’s Cup track record is proven: It rarely goes well. In his two lone full-time Cup seasons, he finished *checks notes* 29th and 30th, respectively. To be fair, he was in abysmal equipment back then, but over the last decade, he’s only earned one top 10 at the Cup level. Meanwhile, Anthony Alfredo, who has a much longer racing career in front of him than Allgaier at 26 years old, piloted the No. 48 to what was trending toward a top-10 finish just last weekend.
What’s more, if two or more drivers splitting time in the seat was the plan all along, why do it this way? Last week was at a track that Allgaier has absolutely dominated. Why not let him drive at Phoenix Raceway and let Alfredo take his chances at Vegas?
At the very least, Alfredo provides an option for the future, whether that’s in the O’Reilly Series or otherwise down the road. Allgaier simply keeps the seat warm without drawing attention, and maybe that’s where the attraction lies for a Hendrick team that has a lot of fires to put out early in this season. Instead of making the exciting play with Alfredo, Hendrick opted for the safer choice in Allgaier, and if that doesn’t sum up the state of a team that has had one of its slower starts to a race season in recent memory, I don’t know what does.
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Should someone give Brad Keselowski his own show?
Brad Keselowski stepped into the booth this week for a vacationing Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his weekly podcast, the Dale Jr. Download, and if you missed it, stop what you’re doing, fire up your app of choice and lock in. He gave some of the most well-thought-out answers of any driver I’ve heard interviewed in the last few years and offered a balance of humor and experience that shows he has serious broadcasting chops.
As someone who researches mass media for a living, there could have been no better stand-in for Earnhardt, and that got me thinking: Who wouldn’t give Keselowski his own show once he retires? Sure, the Michigander claims he only does one podcast a year to keep himself out of trouble, but what happens when he doesn’t have to worry about being called to the NASCAR hauler anymore?
There has to be a dollar amount for Keselowski to do his own show, whether that’s a weekly podcast, a deal with a broadcast partner or in RFK Racing’s own version of Dirty Mo Media. As one of the most respected voices in the sport, he would only add to the growing list of qualified former racers who are now taking to the airwaves, and he might have more interesting takes than all of them combined.
Keselowski absolutely should be offered his own show once he decides to transition into full-time ownership. My only hope is that when he does, he gets paired with a co-host who knows how best to leverage whatever broadcasting chops he clearly has, week in and week out. Better yet, I’m sure the new SPEED show with Kevin Harvick and Will Buxton could use a third chair in the future.
Is Ryan Blaney the face of Team Penske, or does Joey Logano still carry the torch?
It seems Team Penske has quite a good problem on its hands. Both Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano now have two of the largest fan bases in NASCAR and have for quite some time. That creates an interesting dynamic, and one that Roger Penske is undoubtedly happy to work around, in that there is confusion about who exactly is the face of the organization.
Blaney is the new spearhead of the Penske marketing organization, but that doesn’t mean Logano has been put out to pasture. What you’re seeing play out is a key strategy that takes high-level execution on a corporate scale.
In marketing terms, we call it a brand transition. The two drivers have markedly different social media presences and brand voices, with Blaney’s being the more recognizable in NASCAR, especially with the new ‘stache he’s been sporting since the start of the season (as funny as it might be, it does matter). Additionally, Blaney connects with a much younger demographic than Logano, one that NASCAR and its teams desperately want to attract.
That same wish for younger attention spans has made its way into Blaney’s sponsorship portfolio, with lifestyle brands like Body Armor being featured more prominently in recent years. All of this culminates in a two-headed, dual-faced marketing approach for Penske, and it’s one of the best executed in the sport.
While Blaney serves as the forward-facing member of the team whose face is pinned as the future leader of the race program, Logano is still framed as the team’s steady anchor and veteran champion. Logano is pitched as the established, institutional leader in the garage, while Blaney is pitched to the fans as the face Penske and its key figure in competitive marketing.
It all works out in the end, but if you think you’ve seen the end of Blaney’s push to the forefront of Penske’s material, think again. This is only the beginning.
With the success of the 750-horsepower package at Phoenix, should NASCAR extend it to 1.5-mile tracks as well?
To quote NASCAR itself here, “Hell yeah.”
It’s worth mentioning that last week I predicted the new 750-horsepower package had the potential to be the Magic Bullet that would make the racing at Phoenix something other than a snooze fest. Point for the good guys there, then, because it was everything but.
Whether you were a fan of the amount of cautions or not, the added horsepower, coupled with the crew chiefs’ refusal to run recommended tire pressures (and who could blame them?), made sure that so many drivers in the field were on a different strategy that it made my head spin at times.
At Circuit of the Americas, it led to what was, all things considered, an ethical race, and Shane van Gisbergen didn’t even walk away from the entire field in the process. The racing was flat-out better at each track than it was the previous year. You can imagine my disappointment, then, in knowing that we’ll be going back to the same old 1.5-mile package we had last year for Vegas this weekend.
Let’s remember, though, that before we had this excellent new package, the 1.5-mile tracks were where the Next Gen car actually shone. Independent rear suspension and sticky tires be damned, the cars actually put on a good show at just about every 1.5-mile track they go to. That being said, what’s wrong with putting on a better show?
To my knowledge, we don’t have any live testing data from a 1.5-mile course with the new package, and I know NASCAR would never realistically turn its product loose without at least some idea of what would happen. But simulators do exist, and there’s plenty of time to get a test in to see what would happen. I know I, for one, would love to see what the racing would evolve into with that many more horses under the hood at some tracks that are otherwise a bit boring to watch.
