RAB Racing announced Tuesday that Jason Bowles would be taking over the #09 for this weekend’s Nationwide race at Phoenix. Bowles is the reigning West Series Champion and will be making his second start in NASCAR’s number two series.
This move of course displaced the guy, albeit temporarily, who had been in the car all season, Scott Riggs. Since Daytona, Riggs has been on a race-to-race deal with the team, keeping the car in the top-30 (meaning a guaranteed starting spot), but doing so without any major sponsorship.
The driver change certainly didn’t appear, to me at least, to be a controversial move, but boy was I wrong. The linked announcement on the team’s Facebook page has gotten a lot of comments (some of which have been deleted), and unfortunately most of them have been quite negative.
Here were some of my favorites:
Wow! While you are stabbing Scott in the back, you may as well kick his ass too!
Your logic wreaks of stench like that of a sewer.
Now I understand fan loyalty, but this is far beyond the pale. That fans would attack a team that put their driver in a car unsponsored is beyond me. As we’ve said here many times racing is a business, and as we all know it takes money to run a business. Unfortunately Scott isn’t bringing any to the table.
While I know they both wish they were, the team’s two owners aren’t made of money either. Robby Benton and Brack Maggard are not Roger Penske and Rick Hendrick. At this point they are funding a team out of their own pockets for Riggs. If you ask me, and I’m sure if you ask Scott too, this is a pretty generous thing to do.
Beyond their own financial well being though Maggard and Benton have employees who depend on them every month for a paycheck. The money that Jason Bowles is bringing to the team means they will be able to keep going for an extended period of time. That means these guys will be able to pay their bills and feed their families. It also means the team will live to fight another day potentially with Riggs behind the wheel.
While I’m sure RAB would love to keep Riggs out on track (especially with the way he’s been running), if money comes along from some other driver they have to take it. Certainly the generous donations of some very loyal fans helped, but that $30,000 wasn’t even enough to fund the full weekend at Nashville let alone keep him running for more races (not that they’re complaining).
Robby Benton told the AP:
“The amount we were able to raise was unbelievable,” Benton said
I think too often we let our loyalties cloud our judgement of situations. For five races this season (four he qualified for) RAB has put Scott Riggs in a car and asked nothing of him, but to drive (I challenge you to find another small team that would do the same). For that they are getting harangued by select Riggs fans on the Internet and I’m sure through other forms of communication. I find that distasteful and mind-boggling to say the least.
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