The 2018 Transaction That Will Affect NASCAR The Most

Of 180 Cup-level NASCAR races over the last five seasons, a whopping 147 were won by a driver from one of four multi-car teams: Gibbs (45), Penske (36), Hendrick (34) and Stewart-Haas (32). Each of those four teams also won one series championship in that time.

Seventeen of the other 33 races, or three times more than anyone outside the Big Four, were won by the feisty team owned by Barney Visser. All 17 were by Martin Truex Jr., their only driver for four of those five years. Truex, the driver from Mayetta, N.J., also won the 2017 Cup championship and finished among the top four in 2015 and 2018.

Visser announced in September that he was folding Furniture Row Racing, based in Colorado, because he lost a critical corporate sponsor and could not throw any more of his own money at the program. Truex, crew chief Cole Pearn and a few others will move to Gibbs’ team in 2019.

Because he is moving to one of the juggernauts in the sport, Truex won’t be as much fun to root for as he was for Furniture Row Racing, which had only two full-time drivers for one of the 14 seasons at the Cup level, when Erik Jones joined Truex in the 2017 season.

Jones basically was driving for Furniture Row on borrowed time, because Gibbs had signed him midway through that season to replace the veteran Matt Kenseth in 2018. Jones, 22, did well for Gibbs last year, winning his first Cup race and qualifying for the 16-driver playoffs.

Joey Logano won the 2018 title for Roger Penske, but Truex was particularly driven to repeat as a champion for Visser after he said he was folding the team. Truex won four races in 2018 and finished second to Logano in the championship race at Homestead, Fla.

Truex and Furniture Row had technical help from Gibbs, but Visser’s team was clearly an underdog as it kept pace with the big boys. It was not as if Truex got lucky every now and then. In his championship season, he won eight races, with 26 top-10 finishes.

NASCAR had several lousy developments in a forgettable 2018 season, perhaps none worse optically than when CEO and president Brian France was arrested on charges of aggravated driving while intoxicated and criminal possession of a controlled substance only hours after the prodigy Chase Elliott outlasted Truex to win his first career Cup race.

But Visser’s departure hurts much more, because it was not as if Truex was riding around at the back of the pack every week. Truex was truly competitive. Besides, neither Visser nor Truex had Southern roots or the benefit of being related to someone nationally famous from NASCAR.

The way Visser left the sport was hardly encouraging for anyone who might have thought about starting a race team, let alone NASCAR selling Visser’s story to investors as a lasting success story. Plus, it was a blow for nostalgia, an angle NASCAR has all but forgotten.

At its inception, NASCAR had only one-car teams, and they often offered the best storylines in the sport. In 1990, a year before J.D. McDuffie was killed in an accident in a Cup race at Watkins Glen, N.Y., I wrote a story about him. He’d raced in more than 600 Cup races to that point, and had lost them all.

“I ain’t got nothing else going,” McDuffie told me. “Racing is my life. If I don’t run, I don’t eat. This ain’t a weekend hobby to me.”

When the one-car Wood Brothers team won a race — as they have just twice since 2001, once in the Daytona 500 — it has been seen as a sign that the little guys could have their day every once in a while. The late Alan Kulwicki won a Cup title with his one-car team in 1992.

There will still be one-car teams in NASCAR but most of them will be field-filling scavengers. Bubba Wallace got a lot of attention for finishing second at Daytona for the one-car Richard Petty Motorsports team, but he did not have a top-five finish the rest of the year.

NASCAR is implementing rules for 2019 that it hopes will result in closer racing, but its new president, Steve Phelps, said in November that the racing in 2018 was “the best we’ve ever had,” but that included four top multi-car teams. The little guys are dropping, one by one.

Maybe that is just the way it needs to go. But it is nowhere near as fun or charming or romantic, either. Visser’s departure was NASCAR’s biggest loss, of many, in 2018.