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Interest in America's No. 2 spectator sport, NASCAR, is at an all-time high with no signs of letting up. All indicators – attendance, television viewership and ratings as well as Fortune 500 corporate sponsor involvement – are at levels never before reached.

In Wall Street terms, NASCAR is a buy.

That's the good news. Now for the bad news.

The cost to participate in Nextel Cup racing has skyrocketed over the past decade despite efforts to keep it under control, and competition has escalated to the point where single-car teams are a rarity while multi-car teams are practically a mandatory part of doing business.

That escalation largely is a function of the growth of the sport.

What was once a regional racing series based in the southern and eastern United States has now become a multi-billion dollar international series that each week attracts an average of 100,000 fans to its live events with millions more following on television and the Internet.

These are fans willing to spend big dollars on tickets – and merchandise featuring a driver's face, turning a product it into a profit-maker for its producer and the driver.

Stock car racing has grown beyond the wildest dreams of its pioneers. In NASCAR's early days, drivers financed their passion with the extra money from their regular jobs. Winning races was gratifying, but more importantly it meant that drivers could continue to race – and that was the extent of the business model.

Today, NASCAR is big business and the current crop of team owners is a unique breed: part competitor, part CEO.

Successful owners need to not only be capable of running a large company, but also able hire the right combination of people drawn from a small pool of specialists who know how to build and maintain a race car. And most importantly, owners have to possess the right people skills to interact with the sponsors.

Despite those lofty prerequisites and the inherent difficulties in running a successful organization, the bottom line is that no one is anxious to leave NASCAR ownership and a lot of people want to get in.

The obstacles

What differentiates NASCAR team ownership from other major sports like the NFL or Major League Baseball is that to be an owner in those sports, one first needs to purchase a franchise, pending approval by the other league owners. But there are no franchises in NASCAR, and anyone with the will and the means can participate.

So why isn't there a long line of people waiting to be team owners in NASCAR?

The answer is simple. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

"Finding the right people, no matter how much money you have, is the key," team owner Bill Davis said. "To start up any business is hard, especially in a competitive environment like this with a relentless, week-after-week schedule like we have – it's just hard to do."

Long-time owner Jack Roush, whose teams won the past two Nextel Cup championships and currently make up half of those in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, takes a rather skeptical view of ownership.

"The business of owning a race car team is not good. You'd be better off owning a chain of hamburger stands, a car wash or picking up garbage," Roush said. "You'll have a predictable, expected rate of return on your investment if you do it well, that is much more assured and favorable than the same amount of money spent on a race car."

Roush cites the unpredictability of racing. A team owner could develop an engine part that either fails during competition or doesn't help the team. Hendrick Motorsports surely spent a good deal on finding a way to modify the shock absorbers used on Jimmie Johnson and Kyle Busch's race cars, only to have those changes banned by NASCAR.

Roush's rather harsh assessment is shared by several team owners who find themselves constantly being squeezed by escalating costs. Most owners will quote a price of $15 million to $20 million dollars annually to run a single-car team (running two cars doesn't necessarily double that figure, as many of the resources are shared between the two teams). That is up from $9 million to $12 million just five years ago and $2 million to $8 million 10 years ago.

But most owners view it as the price they have to pay to play the game, so to speak.

"It's a lot tougher than it has been just because there's so much to consider these days – having to have more employees, paying the cost of new technology and just the cost of everything involved in running a business," team owner Richard Childress said. "It's still a good business, a rewarding business, when things are going well."

Breaking in

The next crop of NASCAR owners could come from other forms of racing, but a good track record in other series doesn't necessarily translate to success in NASCAR. Just ask Cal Wells and Chip Ganassi, who both came to NASCAR after being successful in open-wheel racing but have struggled to find those same levels of success in NASCAR.

"While the [NASCAR stock] cars may seem very agricultural, very archaic, they're extraordinarily unique," Wells said. "This series is much more like Formula One than Champ Car or the IRL ever dream of being. You build everything yourself, it's all custom built.

"It's a great racing series, but it's extraordinarily competitive."

Unlike Wells, who built his NASCAR organization from scratch and admits that if he had it all to do over again he would partner with an existing team, Ganassi partnered with team owner Felix Sabates, a move that helped but hasn't guaranteed success.

That's still better than the alternative, according to Bill Davis.

"It would be an incredible challenge to come in here now and start up a brand new team," Davis said. "We've seen a lot of people try it recently and a lot of people talk about doing it and it hasn't happened."

Davis sees an obvious alternative to starting from scratch.

"I talk to people all the time who are interested in coming into the sport," said Davis. "Hopefully what's going to happen in the future is somebody who wants to come into the sport will buy out one of the owners who has been around a while and built up a successful organization instead of them having to sell it piece by piece like we've seen in the past."

But former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman essentially are trying to build a new team from scratch, albeit with a little help from an existing organization.

After originally announcing in 2003 their intention to start a NASCAR team, it has taken the pair the better part of two years to get their Hall of Fame Racing project rolling. Just last week, the team announced it has partnered with Joe Gibbs Racing to field a Nextel Cup team beginning in 2006 and hired Philippe Lopez to be the crew chief.

While they expect to benefit from their relationship with Gibbs, HOF Racing still faces a major hurdle being a single-car team in a sport where multi-car teams have become almost mandatory.

Owner Robert Yates regrets that the sport has gone to multi-car teams, but having more than one team under a single ownership umbrella is invaluable – and more or less necessary – when it comes to shared costs, testing data, race setups and the like.

"If someone came up to me and asked me how they could get into Cup racing, first I'd tell them how much it costs to bring one car in," Yates said. "Then I'd tell them that they'd have to double it, because you need to have two cars. That's the problem these days, you need two cars."

Yates has been involved with NASCAR racing for more than three decades and became a team owner in 1988, and he has watched the sport and ownership change radically.

"I enjoy it and I don't enjoy it," he said. "When I first started, everyone I worked with just wanted to race. Now you have to wear the business hat more than the racing hat. And there are so many people involved. To some, it's just a job to support their family, so trying to keep everyone motivated and focused is very important."

What's next

The current cost of operating a Cup team could change dramatically over the next few years, however, if Toyota comes into Cup racing with the business model it uses in the Craftsman Truck Series. In that series, the manufacturer builds both the vehicles and engines and supplies them to teams, thus cutting the costs for a team owner. Although the jury is still out on whether or not that business model would work in Nextel Cup, the cost of operating a team would easily be cut in half.

But if costs do continue to rise, the shape and face of team ownership will be forced to change, taking NASCAR to yet another plateau.

Roush and others suggest that NASCAR has to seriously consider a revenue sharing arrangement that will allow the vast sums of money being realized through the sport's television broadcast agreements to be spread amongst the teams in much the same manner that the NFL, MLB and Formula One already are doing.

NASCAR officials so far have not expressed any desire to strike such an agreement, maintaining that the owners are independent business people and that their current arrangement with the team owners will remain as is.

Childress feels that the rising costs will open the door to a new kind of ownership.

"Big corporations that are looking to have a presence stronger than just sponsorship will be the owners of the future," Childress said. "So will investment groups that will look to this sport as an investment. You'll see more and more of those types getting into the sport."

That potential future actually can be seen now. Valvoline already is one of those corporate owners, having been an ownership partner with MB2 Motorsports for the past three years and with Evernham Motorsports starting next year.

In spite of all of its difficulties and what some call a failed business model, none of these owners are ready to give it up anytime soon.

"I'll be doing this as long as I'm above ground," Roush said. "I'm just one of those 16-year-old kids who loved to burn rubber and still does."