Remember racing when all you needed was a good car, a good driver, and a little luck? Long gone I fear, replaced by the sponsor-driven world of motorsports.

It’s gotten too expensive to go big-time racing without a sponsor, and big-time drivers frequently change series looking for the big-time salary (as would I). Follow the money, right?

Somebody has to pay the fines when racers behave like racers rather than Nextel-Disney puppets, or somebody breaks a rule. This happens all the time from racing incidents, “avoidable contact” (no, I meant to hit him right in the jaw) and illegal equipment: Please pay $50,000 and lose 25 championship points (out of 5,000 or so).

That’s cheap. In “world championship” Formula One, this summer’s brouhaha over Ferrari engineering documentation in a Maclaren employee’s possession resulted in, the Maclaren team out $100 million and all manufacturer points (the drivers are still in it) 2008. I’m guessing Max Mosley or Bernie Ecclestone, the power and money men behind F1, needed a new yacht.

Here’s NASCAR’s money problem this year, decided in court and not on track:

Cingular (partly owned by AT&T at the time) coughed up $150 mil to sponsor the #31 car starting in 2001. When AT&T expanded and bought up what it didn’t own of Cingular, it wished to change the logos to reflect the AT&T name rather than the defunct Cingular name.

Naturally Nextel/Sprint, which will spend $750 million over 10 years to be the series primary sponsor, cried foul, arguing that their contract was to be the only telecommunications company sponsor except for those already on board. It probably didn’t help that most surveys from the first half of 2007 found Nextel/Sprint ranked well-behind leaders Verizon and AT&T in terms of revenue, subscribers, added subscribers per quarter (what Wall Street likes), or customer service. This was Nextel/Sprint’s best chance to get AT&T out of the NASCAR picture(s).

Personally, I think since AT&T was already a partial sponsor of the 31 they should be able to keep their contract and stay on. Last I heard, it seems Nextel had a more successful lawyer than AT&T and the logos can stay for a while but must be off by 2009. And you know with television rights involved, no company is going to pay tens of millions for a car they can’t have a logo on.

I’ll suggest to AT&T that they decorate Burton’s car like a giant Apple iPhone minus any AT&T logo. With a five-year exclusive deal to one of the hotter phones on the market, they could really rub it in. Or maybe sponsor the blimp and equip it with a jammer to render Nextel/Sprint phones useless at tracks.

And then I’m going to the local dirt track to watch Mike’s Muffler and Ernie’s Excavating duke it out, with at least one of them “explaining the rules” to the unenlightened flagman after the race.