France, teams to meet in coming weeks

NASCAR executives, including chairman Brian France, will meet with team owners, drivers and key team officials over the next several weeks to talk about significant issues facing the sport. The meetings will be done by team organization instead of during one big meeting with all Cup or Nationwide teams, NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston confirmed. Over the past couple of years, NASCAR has increased its use of "town hall" style meetings to discuss potential changes to the sport. Last year, it opted for smaller team forums by meeting separately with each organization. The meetings are designed to get feedback and help NASCAR officials make decisions. "The old theory was that when you're at the races with them all the time, we had the communication lines wide open," France said about the team forums last January. "That's true, but it's too busy now to assume that we can have all the communications and get all the issues they want to get resolved with us at the track. So we just changed it around where we're having these meetings. & In the town hall meetings, a lot of people didn't want to speak up when there were 12 other drivers or something like that and they didn't feel comfortable." NASCAR typically does not make public what it plans to discuss with the teams. But last summer, executives of several teams met separately from NASCAR to talk about potential solutions to cost containment issues such as the number of people that travel on race weekends and the current ban on testing at tracks that have NASCAR national touring series events. Sporting News