No one will come right out and say it, but those days might be coming to an end. Ask anybody who owns stocks. Ask anybody who bought a car. Ask anybody that used to work at Oldsmobile. As much as the folks who work in racing would like to believe it, racing's tremendous growth the past decade is no more tied to the excitement of the sport than it is to the economy.
People go to the races because they can afford it.
People buy sponsors' products because they can afford them, and for the last 10 years, the economy has been booming. OK, and because racing is exciting. Baseball's exciting, too, but it is only now beginning to recover from its own heavy dose of greed. The player strikes, backbreaking demands from team owners to have cities build them new stadiums, and that sort of thing all served to knock baseball down a peg. Demanding more from the other end while delivering basically the same product every year only works during boom cycles.