DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The highly popular “youth movement” discussion became front and center once again this weekend at Daytona International Speedway after International Speedway Corporation president John Saunders told investors Thursday morning in a quarterly earning phone conference that a factor of the company’s decline in attendance is due to the “lack of star power” in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.
That afternoon, drivers considered part of that youth movement responded, some more critical than others.
One of the more vocal drivers is Ryan Blaney, driver of the No. 12 BodyArmor Ford Fusion for Team Penske who proclaimed the young guys needing to win is becoming tiresome.
“Honestly, this whole young guys need to win now thing is getting old,” Blaney said. “We’re trying. We’re trying our hardest. It’s not like I go out there and I’m happy for fifth every single week.”
“Any other guy under the age of 25 I’ll just say is the same way. It’s not a competition here between young guys and old guys, it’s a competition between 39 other cars and yourself. No matter what your age is or your experience level everyone is trying to accomplish the same goal.”
The veterans of Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Clint Bowyer, all of whom are old than 33 years of age have dominated the Cup Series this season winning 15 of the 17 races entering Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 outside of Austin Dillon winning the Daytona 500 and Joey Logano taking the checkered flag at Talladega Superspeedway in April.
Overall, just six different winners have won in the 17 races run thus far and although Blaney believes a variant form of winners would be ideal, the teams that are winning have found a combination that works.
Over the course of the remainder of the regular season and then the 10-race Playoff run, it’s up to his No. 12 team and the others to find the same ingredients.
“You can’t be down about something like that,” Blaney added. “You just have to try to work harder and try to get your team to where it is. I just think more variation of winners would be good, but those guys are dominating.
“They’ve found something and good for them. They deserve it. They’ve worked hard enough to do it and we’ve got to work harder to be able to run with those guys.”
While Blaney was irritated by Saunders’ comments, Dillon rebutted with a question.
“I just want to know what we do about it,” Dillon spoke Thursday afternoon.
“How do you move forward with that because the guys that are in this sport are talented enough to win. We haven’t made any changes this year to the packages that we’re running. Each and every week you probably can guess … who the top three guys are probably going to be. I bet if everybody had to bet their house on it, they’d take between three guys right now, maybe four. I bet he would too.”
Richard Petty Motorsports rookie Darrell Wallace Jr. took a tougher perspective.
“There’s a lot of boring stuff that we still have that has been the same thing at ISC tracks that we could update to get more fans out,” Wallace quipped. “It kind of goes hand in hand from us behind the wheel to people that are hosting us.
“It’s a group effort.”
ISC owns eight tracks on the Cup Series schedule including Auto Club (Calif.) Speedway, Chicagoland Speedway, Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway, Homestead-Miami (Fla.) Speedway, Kansas Speedway, Michigan International Speedway and Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
