Changes inevitable in Bill Jr.'s sport

I've gotten this question a lot lately: Will we eventually see obvious effects of the passing of NASCAR czar Bill France Jr.?

On first thought, I answer that we already have just in the weeks since France died June 4.

That very day, Kurt Busch committed an offense for which I felt France would have parked him for the rest of the season. He forced a pit crewman to jump onto the hood of Tony Stewart's parked car to avoid being hit as the raging Busch brushed alongside Tony Stewart.

The penalty, announced the day after France's funeral, was what has become a standard wrist slap: a $100,000 fine and a 100-point deduction.

I got the question again June 13 as mobs of media people waited outside Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s racing complex, most of us knowing already that Earnhardt would announce he'll join NASCAR's dominant team, Hendrick Motorsports.

Teaming Earnhardt with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson concentrates so much star power in one place that it might have been too much for France's comfort. The gut instinct here is that France would have found away to keep that alignment from happening.

And now the sponsorship uproar among AT&T, NASCAR and Nextel has become a free-for-all of litigation.

NASCAR on Sunday filed a $100 million counter lawsuit against AT&T, which won an injunction last month in federal court in Atlanta to allow a change of logos on Jeff Burton's car from Cingular (a brand being discontinued) to AT&T.

On Monday AT&T counter-punched, announcing it had signed a new three-year extension of its contract to sponsor Jeff Burton and his Richard Childress Racing team.

Yet to be heard from is Nextel, which in 2004 began a 10-year, $700 million deal to sponsor NASCAR's elite Cup series. Grandfathered in were wireless providers Alltel and Cingular. NASCAR has maintained all along that the grandfather agreement did not allow for a wireless brand other than Cingular to be advertised on Jeff Burton's car.

With the counter suit, NASCAR appears to be protecting its position with Nextel. What if Nextel and its parent company, Sprint, should decide to sue for breach of the exclusivity agreement and get out of the sponsorship deal? Six more years remain on the current contract, so NASCAR -- and more importantly, its member teams and drivers -- could be out $600 million in series sponsorship.

So the first thought was that France, being as close to team owner Richard Childress as he was for 30 years, would have summoned Childress to dinner. Maybe they'd have worked something out before the litigation got so hot and heavy that the law firms are making more money than drivers.

But upon further consideration, all around . . .

My memories of France and his modus operandi are etched in the granite of his rule in his prime, at the height of his powers.

Even if he were alive and healthy today, and using the old methods -- a "benign dictatorship," he allowed his reign to be called -- maybe not even a czar could have stopped the forces that play on a vastly larger and more complex NASCAR.

In 2002, after Tony Stewart thumped a photographer in the garage area at Indianapolis following a race, word from inside was that France wanted him suspended for the rest of that season.

But younger members of NASCAR's inner council knew this was not like throwing out some good ol' boy of yore and telling some small-time sponsor to take a hike. This was Tony Stewart, a skyrocketing star whose absence would create a nationwide uproar and be mentioned every Sunday on Cup telecasts. And this was Home Depot, huge corporation, huge sponsor not only of Tony Stewart but of NASCAR itself.

So maybe now, even with such an egregious offense by Busch, France's iron fist couldn't have come down on racing mogul Roger Penske and sponsoring Miller Brewing Co.

Maybe with such a national microscope placed on the five-week free agency of Earnhardt Jr., NASCAR's most popular driver -- and with Earnhardt being so open about his feelings and wishes -- there could have been no backroom manipulation, even by France as chieftain.

Certainly, it was one thing to run off some small manufacturer of off-brand automotive products as a sponsor, and it is quite another to stare down a monster corporation like AT&T.

France in his time told an awful lot of people what to do, and he meant it, and they did it, or else.

That doesn't work with federal judges.

As the AT&T storms intensify in the federal Northern District of Georgia, threatening NASCAR's long-running dictatorship over who may or may not be a sponsor, and under what brand, the horizon holds even more ominous clouds in the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Kentucky Speedway's lawsuit, which once merely sought a Cup race date from NASCAR, has turned into a straight-up antitrust action. Veteran observers have long wondered whether NASCAR could stand federal-court scrutiny under the Sherman Act, what with the France family owning NASCAR outright, and also controlling International Speedway Corp., which owns 12 of the 22 tracks on the Nextel Cup tour.

So maybe now the storms buffeting NASCAR are reaching such typhoon force, from so many directions, that not even Bill France Jr. firmly at the helm could steer a steady course from here on out.

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