It was no surprise that Dodge announced this week it is pulling out of NASCAR at the end of the season.
In recent years Dodge has been reduced to being a bit player in NASCAR with only two cars in the 43-car Sprint Cup field. This year Penske Racing has been NASCAR’s only Dodge-equipped team running cars full-time in both the first division Sprint Cup and the second division Nationwide Series. Brad Keselowski (below) has won three Sprint Cup races so far this year in one of Penske’s Dodges while Sam Hornish has also won three times in the Nationwide series.
But a few months ago ‘The Captain’, Roger Penske, announced he was switching to Ford next year. His move left Dodge high and dry, searching for a new partnership. Dodge discovered all of NASCAR’s top teams are firmly committed to Chevrolet, Toyota or Ford, and in searching for the right team it reached out and talked to Michael Andretti, exploring the possibility of Andretti expanding beyond IndyCar. But those conversations came to nothing and Dodge took the decision last week to end its NASCAR programme.
Dodge’s racing boss Ralph Gilles (below) said money wasn’t a driving factor in the decision. Gilles instead said it was because Dodge couldn’t find the right team or partners to build, develop and race its cars and engines. “We couldn’t unfortunately put together a structure that made sense to continue our business and competitive objectives for next year,” Gilles commented. “This decision was not based on budgets. This was a case of the different pieces of the puzzle not fitting together to satisfy the structure we needed to fit our overall business and competitive objectives.”
Dodge won its first race in NASCAR’s premier division in 1953 with Lee Petty driving his own car. The Pettys – three-time champion Lee and his son, seven-time champion Richard – were synonymous with Dodge or Plymouth for many years with Richard winning the 1974 and ‘75 NASCAR championships aboard Petty Enterprises STP Dodges.
In 1977 Dodge pulled out of NASCAR for the first time, returning almost a quarter of a century later in 2001. Chip Ganassi’s fledgling NASCAR team raced Dodges for a few years with some success, but in 2008 Ganassi merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc. and switched to Chevrolet. Richard Petty’s team also raced Dodges for a few years, but Petty moved to Ford this year with Penske announcing earlier this year that his NASCAR team will join Petty and Jack Roush’s Roush-Fenway team in Ford’s corral next season.
Richard Petty’s son Kyle raced in NASCAR for many years and now works as a TV commentator. On SpeedTV in America this week Kyle put some perspective on Dodge’s departure from NASCAR.
“Dodge leaving is a big deal because it was a big deal when they came back,” Petty said. “Years ago NASCAR had Ford, Chevy, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and so forth, but it had dwindled down to Ford and Chevy. So when Dodge came back, having a return to ‘The Big Three’ was huge. “Sponsorship is down on a lot of cars. Teams running in the back and middle of the field are struggling to find finances and manufacturer support. So with only three manufacturers next year and those three probably entrenched with their current teams, Dodge leaving widens the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’
“When it comes to the fans, there still is a group loyal to particular manufacturers, although that is a small segment. However, whether you’re a Ford, Chevy or Toyota fan, you look at this and figure that if Dodge can pull out, so can any of the remaining three. So this impacts the perception of the sport.”
That shows how difficult is car racing nowadays for manufacturarers, as Dodge struggled to build a competitive structure since their comeback in 2001.
But it happens also in Formula1 as evidenced by Renault, Honda, Toyota, BMW, Jaguar, etc, etc. Perhaps this is the consequence of dealing with private teams instead of creating a real works team managed by the company….
You cannot compare F1 efforts to NASCAR. NASCAR is spec racing.
The reason to drop out is obvious: NASCAR is no longer “stock” cars. Fans know it’s just stickers that differentiate the cars, and it’s nothing like the days of the Plymouth Superbird and Dodge Daytona. NASCAR took the “stock” out of stock cars.
Since FIAT, the autoworkers union, and North American taxpayers own Dodge, maybe getting out of racing is a good idea. And, NASCAR had to build spec cars because Detroit doesn’t make cars that size anymore. And if you don’t think F1 is a spec series, you’re kidding yourself.
Spec racing it might be now, but in 2013 NASCAR is bringing back some of the originality by using body shapes that more resemble the cars sold on the street.
NASCAR took the stock out of stock car racing because of guys like Smokey Yunick and Junior Johnson (and many others) because they were so adept at circumventing the rules.They didn’t do it to create the ‘spec’ racer we have today. That happened to be a by-product of the cheating mentality (or ‘unfair advantage’) that persists in stock car racing (and all racing in general).
Dodge saying adios means nothing to me. I wouldn’t own a Chrysler product if they won every race. Good looking cars, but I don’t want to replace the transmission after 80,000 miles…..
80,000 miles? I think you mean 8,000 miles.
F1 a spec series, …tell that one to Adrian Newey.
Honestly, if Chrysler has any hope, they need to reinvent the company as yet not another slowly dying Detroit brand.
I note they are going back to Lemans with the new Viper.
Everything has a finite number of unknowns and once they are mostly discovered, like in motorsport, spec racing is the only answer, unfortunately. Otherwise, to be an open series, it has to allow openness in areas that cost tens of millions in research and development like only a few F1 or WEC teams can afford in all of global motorsport.
Still, NASCAR has always built its legend around it being about the drivers, like Robert Duvall pointed out to Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder so the current state of the cars fits right into that I guess.