Catchfence

The story that the Richard Petty-George Gillett organization has signed to run Fords in 2010 in alliance with Doug Yates’ team is something out of left field, and even with the reality that manufacturer loyalty is nowhere close to what it once was, it is still a stunning surprise. The biggest aspect of surprise here is not just the fact of Petty-Gillett’s organization switching to Fords – it is that Ford, after nearly a decade in which it was basically just one team (Roush-Fenway) with a Yates Racing outfit that opened the decade as a championship power and ends it as a powerless rump-state, is suddenly increasing its fleet to become an actual manufacturer power again.

Of course the last quarter-century and change has been the ultimate roller-coaster for Ford, reentering NASCAR’s wars in 1982 with Harry Melling’s team purchased from George Elliott, the Wood Brothers, and Junie Donlavey’s outfit. Ford won some races but it was in 1985 when it acquired Ranier Racing and the #9 Bill Elliott team campaigned what turned out to be aerodynamically a 7/8-scale racecar that Ford was taken seriously as a racing power again.

But it was in 1992 that Ford escalated its efforts, increasing factory support to seemingly any team it could find, this while GM was cutting back or outright killing its own efforts and Chrysler stayed on the sidelines despite a token ARCA effort. By the 1993 Daytona 500 the majority of starting fields were Fords, and Ford erupted to win six manufacturer titles – 1992, ’94, ’97, ’99-2000, and 2002. It was such that when Penske Racing and the start-up Ricky Rudd outfit went with Ford, public comments from both made no effort to hide their hatred of General Motors and GM’s cheapness in its racing efforts.

But as the multicar era and its concurrent costs escalated, Ford’s effort shriveled; a strengthened Pontiac and Chevy effort was part of the reason, and the entry of Dodge was another part; Toyota’s entry further shrank Ford’s effort – all to where Roush-Fenway and the rump Yates outfit were the only Fords in the field.

But that’s history, pal, to quote Dennis Eckersley.

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Dodge is now the outfit left with just one team – Penske Racing. The fall from grace of Dodge has been head-spinning this decade, as Dodge hit the Winston Cup wars looking ready to put it to GM and Ford. Dodge didn’t just have quality teams in Petty, Bill Davis, and the start-up Ray Evernham team, it had as an official strategy the One Team approach, first seen with the Pontiac effort (of which Petty and Davis had been participants and with which they’d won races) in the mid-1990s and incorporated by Dodge and Petty in the Trucks when both returned there in 1996.

But when Chip Ganassi horned his way onto the program, it earned a public rebuke from Bill Davis in August 2000 and began throwing the One Team effort asunder. Soon Stuttgart usurped control of the program from Lou Patane and from the beginning of 2001 onward the effort devolved from One Team to a series of feuding little fiefdoms; the fact Dodge was winning races helped hide this chronic weakness in the program. Certainly Petty’s team and other Dodge outfits made their share of mistakes in management etc., but they were anything but beyond redemption in a manufacturer program that emphasized One Team.

Dodge’s mismanagement was bound to weaken the program steadily, concurrent with the sport’s absurd economics, and we now have the end game – Dodge is now a rump participant with just one team, while Ford has now gotten better and now actually has some competitive depth.

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If it helps Petty’s efforts then the switch will be worth it even though I’m no fan of Ford. But the other disturbing aspect is that the reality of team mergers is continuing – a reality dictated by the sport’s economics and yet another sign that the sport’s efforts at containing costs not only are not working but appear to be making a bad situation worse. Much is made of “owner-driver” Tony Stewart’s title push, but his team is “owner-driver” more in name than in fact – his outfit is a Hendrick offshoot heavily backed by Chevy. If it were a real owner-driver outfit in the sport’s present economic paradigm, it would be Tommy Baldwin’s team – a non-starter and non-contender.

The day we see the end of team mergers – the day we see teams like Stewart’s end engine lease deals and open their own engine shops – that will be the day we see that the sport’s economics begin to make sense again.

One hopes Petty’s team, regardless of what manufacturer it uses, can succeed as a result.