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Richard Petty Motorsports to field only No. 43 car in 2017
The Cup Series field is shrinking for 2017.
Richard Petty Motorsports said Friday it would field just one car next season. The team had the No. 43 car for Aric Almirola and the No. 44 for Brian Scott in 2016. But Scott announced in November that he would be retiring at the end of the year.
So with just Almirola for the 2017 season, the team is moving forward with one car.
“At the conclusion of the 2016 season, we evaluated how to best improve our on-track product. We feel that it’s in the best interest of our partners and for Richard Petty Motorsports to focus our resources on the No. 43 Ford Fusion and Aric in 2017,” RPM CEO Brian Moffitt said in a statement.
“A concentrated effort on one team will position us for improvement while giving us adequate time to re-establish our two-car team in 2018. For the interim, we will lease one of our two charters.”
The leased charter is, per multiple reports, going to Go Fas Racing for the 2017 season. Go Fas leased its charter to the Wood Brothers for next season and if you’re wondering why a team would lease one charter to lease another, we’ll let ESPN explain it for you. A charter team who finishes in the bottom three in the points standings of charter teams for three-straight years can have its charter revoked.
The move for Go FAS Racing means it will have slightly more guaranteed money next season because the RPM No. 44 team’s past three-year history is better than that of Go FAS Racing’s No. 32 team.
It also should make the original No. 32 charter more valuable for 2018 in two ways: Wood Brothers Racing should finish higher in the owner standings (it was 21st in the 2016 team standings) and therefore would increase its 2018 guaranteed revenue; and it should eliminate a chance the charter could get revoked following the 2018 season because it most likely won’t be among the three worst charter teams for three consecutive years.
The charter system was implemented before the 2016 season and is NASCAR’s version of a franchise system. Thirty-six charters were given out based off recent participation in the Cup Series. Each team that has a charter is guaranteed a spot in every race and gets a bigger share of the NASCAR purse at the end of the season. Four spots are open to teams that don’t have charters.
A team with a charter must run a full season or lease or sell its charter. That’s why RPM is leasing its charter to Go Fas for 2017 and why Roush Fenway Racing is leasing its charter for the No. 16 car to JTG-Daugherty and its new second car for next season. Roush and RPM can’t keep charters for cars they aren’t running. By leasing them, they can retain them for 2018 and hope that there’s simply a short-term contraction in the Cup Series market.
Downsizing is a huge theme heading into 2017. While JTG-Daugherty and Furniture Row are adding cars for next season, the additions of those two cars to the grid are canceled out by the loss of the two aforementioned Ford cars. Tommy Baldwin Racing isn’t participating next season either. And HScott Motorsports shut down. That’s a net loss of three cars.
With the addition of the charter system, Cup fields were downsized from 43 to 40 cars in 2016. And the downsizing didn’t have much practical effect. Four races at the beginning of the season had 39 cars and many races after that saw 40 cars show up for 40 spots. So unless there are some new teams that we haven’t seen yet (unlikely), there’s a distinct reality there will be a lot of races with fewer than 40 cars.
That’s not a good sign for the health of the series. Yeah, teams at the top are doing well in terms of sponsors and speed. But if you believe the middle class in the United States is disappearing as those at the top are getting richer, well, the Cup Series is mimicking your belief.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
