Would a spending cap and luxury tax system work in NASCAR?

It’s easy to see why less successful teams might want a cap and tax system in NASCAR but less obvious to figure out why the sport’s powers would agree.

Could NASCAR even the playing field among Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series teams with a spending cap? And more to the point, should it?

That’s a relevant question after NBC Sports reported today that Richard Petty Motorsports co-owner Andrew Murstein had already asked NASCAR about it, claiming it would create “more competition, more excitement.”

For a team like RPM, which isn’t a force despite the legendary name attached to it, a spending cap — and a luxury tax like the one used by other major sports, which Murstein endorses as the best penalty for teams not abiding by it — would be a godsend. The smaller teams can’t possibly compete with the likes of Hendrick Motorsports, who can simply outspend them for the best drivers, engineers and equipment.

In that respect, NASCAR is a lot more like the Premier League or other European soccer leagues than its fellow North American sports leagues. There’s no draft, no salary cap, nothing to keep one team from having a competitive advantage over the others. If a wealthy oil baron from overseas wanted to simply burn through cash trying to win Monster Energy championships, there’s a good chance they could, or at least have a leg up on the opposition pretty quickly.

That’s not to say that spending = success, because it minimizes the talents of someone like Jimmie Johnson or crew chief Chad Knaus. But if you think they would have won seven Cup Series championships at say, BK Racing, you’re fooling yourself.

From that respect, a spending cap would undoubtedly be beneficial. In other sports, the lesser lights all get their day in the sun every once in a while. The Cleveland Browns win a game or two, the worst pro basketball teams still claim some victories. The difference is those sports have salary caps. A notable one that doesn’t is baseball, but even there, the worst teams still win at least 30 percent of their games most seasons.

Not so in NASCAR, where there are underfunded teams that literally have no chance to win. That raises another question, though, and it’s one that isn’t so easy to answer: would parity really be what most racing fans want to see? The hypothetical level playing field, one where every team has an equal chance to win, is one to which many fans pay lip service. Yet studies find that sports fans are attracted to superstars and dynasties, perhaps more than they’d care to admit.

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Rooting against Hendrick or Kyle Busch or whoever you might not like is part of the fun. If they weren’t as strong, it wouldn’t bring you quite as much pleasure when your favorite driver rose up, defied the odds and triumphed. A relevant example from this decade is Trevor Bayne’s 2011 Daytona 500 victory, which was so thrilling simply because it was so improbable.

For the powerhouse teams, it’s easy to assume they wouldn’t like a cap at all, because no one likes to give up an advantage. Still, it might help them in one increasingly important area: sponsorship. If NASCAR costs were fixed, or at least capped, it would take some pressure out of figuring out the financial equation needed for each different team to work in the Cup Series. That would benefit teams of all sizes, and with sponsor dollars not flowing as readily as they were 10 to 15 years ago, it’s something NASCAR and team owners would have to consider.

And maybe that’s the way a cap and tax system could be sold to all teams, as one of cost control, or at least cost certainty, instead of as a competitive equalizer. Either way, now that this idea is out in the open, it’s one that’s sure to be debated until it comes to pass or NASCAR actually addresses why it won’t.