Brian France on Steering Nascar to a TV Deal

My grandfather founded Nascar more than 60 years ago. When I was growing up, it was really small so I didn’t think it would be big enough to be a career opportunity for me. I started working at the company when I was a teenager. I became CEO in 2003. In any family business, you want to make your mark. If you’re just going to drive the ship as it was before, then you’re probably the wrong person for the job.

I wanted to grow the pie. One way to do that was consolidating the TV rights, which we did in 1999. We couldn’t be a national franchise sport without a broadcast package that reflected that. We needed the money to drive the commercial growth of the sport. The networks, like Fox, NBC, TNT, weren’t thrilled with that. They had existing contracts with the tracks that needed to be unwound. We were asking them to give up on contracts that were relatively low-priced to get in line to get a bigger piece of Nascar at a higher price. The tracks were used to negotiating their own deals. The drivers wanted to make sure their pie was getting bigger. Then you had all these other considerations like whether we franchised it to one network.