NASCAR Chairman Brian France took time on Tuesday to speak with members of the media following Tuesday’s mandatory owner/driver meetings at the NASCAR R&D Center. After two roughly two hour meetings, France is optimistic moving forward. In both meetings, the main topics of the day centered around the current rules package in place, the new car, sponsorship issues and the Substance Abuse Policy.

“My take on it is that we had a really good exchange and we’re happy we did it and we’ll do it again later down the road in the future,” France said.

From here on out, France pointed out NASCAR now needs to take the issues and concerns brought up by the competitors and put them in some sort of order before moving forward.

In terms of the new car, France argued the car has been putting on a good show, but they learned some things during the course of the day from the teams that they may take into consideration.

“Clearly there are some adjustments we learned today that can be made without changing the financial model for team owners,” France admitted. “We have heard some ideas today that we’re going to consider and weight them. They heard some reasoning why – what our think was on staying the course with the new car the way we have. It was just a good, good exchange for the group of people that needed to have that exchange.”

The third-generation Chairman explained there were a number of reoccurring themes throughout the day that were brought to NASCAR’s attention.

“The drivers certainly want the best race car they can drive with the new car or the Nationwide car or whatever they’re driving,” France added. “We heard some good things that would help make a good car drive even better, things like down force and weight distribution. Just different things that they had in mind that we’ve been thinking about and we were going to consider anyway and had been thinking about but it was good to hear them express what they think would really work well.”

A number of drivers brought up the Substance Abuse Policy, but France pointed out he was “quite certain” there was now a clearer understanding of the policy amongst the drivers.

Much like the others that spoke with the media on Tuesday, France explained the meetings touched on a variety of topics and there was no real issue that took command of the conversation.

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