The NASCAR marketing campaign promoting its athletes relies heavily on its young drivers -- the new faces of the sport and ones league executives hope resonate with both new and longtime fans.

But NASCAR's "age" issue isn't just with an aging fan base.

Its owners aren't all that young, bringing into question who will be leading NASCAR from outside the driver's seat.

The owners up there in years don't act their age. Many are active and many show little sign of slowing down. Roger Penske, 81, stayed up for all 24 hours of the Rolex 24 at Daytona, outlasting some of his much younger executives, and spends plenty of weekends at the track.

At 80, Richard Petty remains one of the most sought-after autographs at the track and often can be seen on race weekends monitoring the moves of the Richard Petty Motorsports team.

The over-65 crowd of owners in the top 25 includes Joe Gibbs (77), Jack Roush (turns 76 on April 15), Richard Childress (72), Barney Visser (68), Rick Hendrick (68), Eddie Wood (66 on Sunday) and Gene Haas (65).

So what will happen to the teams when their owners, the racing enthusiasts, can no longer do it?

"It's a great sport," said Coy Gibbs, son of Joe Gibbs and chief operating officer of Joe Gibbs Racing. "People love it. I love it. I grew up in it. My kids love it. And you kind of hand it down from generation to generation.

"You're always going to have hurdles in any sport. Sometimes they are made out to be a little bigger than they actually are."

All the major teams say they have plans in place to continue their founders' legacies. Some have had public scares with death -- Roush has survived two plane crashes and Hendrick survived a bout with leukemia.

Hendrick's son-in-law Marshall Carlson is the team's president. Former driver Jeff Gordon also has taken a more active role in the organization.

"My son-in-law, Marshall Carlson, is doing an unbelievable job," Hendrick said. "He's the president of motorsports. He's 42. Gordon wants to be around. [Dale Earnhardt] Junior, we're partners up at the Xfinity deal. He's retired driving.

"I think our deal is in good shape for the future."

Childress has one daughter, Tina, who is married to former race car driver and RCR senior vice president Mike Dillon.

"She can run it better than me," Childress said. "She runs our winery, some of our other businesses. She's our consultant. Believe me, I hear about it every Monday morning, sometimes Sunday night."

Penske has five children but only two have been fairly active in motorsports -- Greg (who ran the company that owned racetracks) and Jay (the Penske Media Corp. owner also has owned an IndyCar team). Penske has several people who handle his racing operations, including Team Penske president Tim Cindric, who has been with the organization since 1999.

"There is an annual succession planning process in all of the Penske companies," the team said in a statement. "We have strong and experienced management teams in place who are fully capable of operating the business."

Roush's children have not been involved with the operation of the race team. Roush Fenway Racing president Steve Newmark said Roush has financially structured the organization to continue well into the future.

Joe Gibbs' NASCAR team has become a four-car juggernaut. His son Coy said he "ain't letting it go." Malcolm Hope/Icon Sportswire

At JGR, Joe's oldest son, J.D., helped build the team and essentially ran it when his father returned to coaching the Washington Redskins from 2004 to 2007. When J.D. began suffering brain function problems in 2015, Joe became more involved. Coy was promoted to chief operating officer in 2016 and is the namesake expected to lead the team into the future.

"My brother [J.D.] pretty much dedicated his life to this place and I sure as heck ain't letting it go," the 45-year-old Coy Gibbs said. "I will fight as hard as I possibly can because that is his legacy and what he built along with my dad.

"It's important to my family. I can't predict the future, but I plan on being here for the long term."

Coy feels he is prepared. After graduating from Stanford -- he led the football team in tackles his senior year in 1994 -- he worked for the family's NHRA team as a mechanic. He eventually started building his own stock cars, racing from 1999 to 2003. He oversaw JGR's Supercross side for a decade. His 15-year-old son, Ty Gibbs, races late-model stocks.

"As far as the business, that's pretty much all I've ever done, all I've known since I got out of college," Coy said. "I don't know how you get a better education in it. ... There's no college you can go to to understand how to run a race team or understand how a race team operates.

"You just kind of have to live it. That's what I've done the majority of my life."

Coy said he spends much of his time handling things such as the pit crew, the technical side, engineering, travel and the financials. He lets his father and team president Dave Alpern do the sponsorship and media stuff.

"I don't want to stand right beside my dad," Coy said. "That bothers me. It's weird. I'm not going to follow him around. I can do the other side. I think Dave does a great job interacting with everybody -- all the sponsors and the press.

"As long as my dad is there, I feel comfortable. He does a great job and I don't want to be his shadow. That's awkward to me."

The question will be whether the children and other co-owners can step in when their fathers no longer can fill a leadership role.

"The risk is you don't have a dynamic personality that lives on after the founding owner leaves," said Richard Petty Motorsports majority owner Andrew Murstein, who bought into the team in 2010.

"I thought long and hard about that before pulling the trigger for Petty because there's only one Richard Petty. What happens when he is not around anymore? I got comfortable enough knowing that Kyle could [potentially] step into his place."

Murstein, 53, is part of the "young crowd" among the top-25 owners, which includes Chip Ganassi (turns 60 in May), JTG Daugherty Racing co-owner Tad Geschickter (55), Front Row Motorsports owner Bob Jenkins (55), Chip Ganassi Racing co-owner Rob Kauffman (53) and Stewart-Haas co-owner Tony Stewart (46).

Teams obviously can be sold if family or new leadership no longer wants to operate the team. But who will buy?

For those looking to buy into the sport, that model doesn't work. NASCAR's distribution of television money -- 65 percent to the tracks, 25 percent to the teams (through the charter agreements) and 10 percent to NASCAR -- doesn't provide enough base revenue to give investors confidence. The team owners have little influence over the venues, compared to other sports, while the NASCAR-owning France family also has control of more than half the venues on the schedule.

The charter agreements with teams guarantee a certain amount of revenue as well as a spot in every race. Those agreements run through 2020 with an option to take it through 2024, the end of the current television deal with Fox and NBC.

But those guaranteed revenues don't make up the majority of a team's revenue. A team such as Hendrick Motorsports was commanding more than $660,000 a race for Kasey Kahne last year. In 2015, the last year NASCAR publicized purse money, Kahne earned an average of $123,013 for the team per race.

Chip Ganassi Racing's Rob Kauffman has been active in trying to improve the NASCAR business model. Tom Pennington/Getty Images

"It's a challenge," said Kauffman, a former co-owner of Michael Waltrip Racing, which ceased operations after the 2015 season. "The charter system made the business model better, but it's still not great. It's problematic. It's very hard to find sponsors. A very high percentage of a competitive team's budget has to come from third-party sponsors other than league money.

"When you look at other sports that are successful, a much higher percentage of your budget comes from league money. That just puts a lot of pressure on teams for funding."

Some of the NASCAR team owners do have ties to non-motorsports sports ownership. Roush has the Fenway Sports Group as a 50-50 partner, but the Red Sox ownership has stayed primarily in the background. Murstein, president of Medallion Financial Corp., also owns a professional lacrosse team.

They both have a love for racing. George Gillett, the former Liverpool FC owner and Montreal Canadiens owner who bought the majority of Evernham Motorsports in 2007, was out of the sport in fewer than four years.

Kauffman said "there's no long line of people looking to get into running a NASCAR team" and he doesn't field many calls from investors.

"The only thing in common is it is called 'a team' -- those teams you own [in other sports] is a permanent franchise and a piece of a league," Kauffman said. "In NASCAR, it's owned by one family and the teams are contracted for a period of time."

Murstein, who formed Properties Acquisition Corp. in 2008, raised $220 million and went looking to purchase sports teams.

"Almost every team [we looked at] lost money," Murstein said. "I think people would invest even if they lost money. It's the possibility of going to a [worth of] zero that you have in NASCAR that you don't have in other sports.

"You could buy Hendrick Motorsports for $300 million and they could make $20 million a year or lose $20 million a year. It could be worth zero if they lose their sponsors."

A car enthusiast and NASCAR fan, Murstein loved the idea of aligning with a brand such as Richard Petty. His competitive side wants to return that team to prominence.

"I do get a lot of questions from very smart and successful people," he said. "It's more about how the sport works. They all love elements of the business model, the large crowds and fan base, the fact that you only have to pay one star athlete. ... However, they won't pull the trigger and invest because it's not a true franchise sport.

"We need to treat it more like one so we can have more investors and owners. If done the right way, NASCAR teams should sell for far more than hockey teams. NASCAR is a far bigger sport with better TV ratings. Even small market and unsuccessful hockey franchises can sell for over $300 million."

Murstein, who believes drivers are underpaid but can't get the money they deserve until the model changes, said the sport needs to change its scheduling (such as having a Monday night race) and have a more diverse driver lineup. He also believes the manufacturing of the cars needs to be streamlined with only a few companies building the cars in order to level the playing field.

The answers aren't simple. Among the 2008 team owners who are no longer owners in racing are Gillett, Ray Evernham, Teresa Earnhardt, Doug Yates, Michael Waltrip and Red Bull. Go back 15 years and the owners no longer involved include Bill Davis, A.J. Foyt, Robert Yates, Cal Wells and the MB2 ownership group, which sold to Bobby Ginn, who was out of business after 2007.

BK Racing owner Ron Devine said he put $35 million into the operations of his team over the past six years and it is now in bankruptcy.

Owners who don't buy a team but start from scratch face huge odds. Furniture Row Racing won one race in its first 10 years and a championship in its 12th.

"The system has been around a long time," Kauffman said. "You have to work from where you are. We've made some progress in improving it, and I think we need to continue to make progress improving it.

"We have to come up with how do you make it a sustainable business so that people like retiring drivers and other folks can look at it and say it is a viable business."

It is a business that in some ways continues to be a transition of what typically was a sport of family businesses to one that might require more investment.

These are family race teams operating as big companies. Coy Gibbs said for him to have lunch during the work week with each of his employees, it would take more than two years.

"It is hard when you get this big -- it's hard to keep the family feel to it," Gibbs said. "That's what is important to us. It is important to my dad, my brother, to me. It's difficult as you grow.

"But that's always been the goal. We run probably totally different than a lot of race teams. We are family-run. We do a lot of things that probably don't make financial sense but makes sense to our culture and the values that we have. And that's important to us."