Turn 2

Some sports, like football and baseball, don't seem to be much affected by the economy. Oh, sure, there may be fewer fans in the seats, but the teams keep playing anyway, and eventually, the economy comes back around.

Then there's NASCAR.

This is a terrible time to be a team owner in the top levels of stock-car racing. Sponsorship money is drying up fast, and that's already shut down BAM Racing. This week, Dario Franchitti lost his ride because Chip Ganassi can't find a primary sponsor for his car.

And the Yates guys have been runing around with blank, white cars for weeks at a time.

MIchael Waltrip Racing can't find a full-time sponsor for the 00 car, and DEI's 01 is sponsored by...DEI, which, according to the company, means the car wil be cut for 2009 if a sponsor isn't secured.

The existing major sponsors are playing musical chairs--Caterpillar is moving from the 22 to the 31 (which leaves the Dave Blaney in a tough spot, since he now needs to find another sponsor), and, while Childress is adding another team, they convinced General Mills to move from Bobby Labonte's #43 Petty Enterprises ride to their new car.

And Tony Stewart doesn't seem to be taking Home Depot along with him to his (rumored) new ride at Haas-CNC, and even he's reportedly joined the game of musical chairs with existing sponsors: Stewart has been talking to "everyone in the garage," with Office Depot and Old Spice, which is on his Nationwide series car, as the primary candidates, according to ESPN.

With the exception of AFLAC, which reportedly outspent Office Depot to be on Carl Edwards' 99 car, there just aren't many new companies trying to buy into the sponsorship game.

It costs upwards of $20 million for a company to get into the NASCAR primary-sponsorship game, because, despite NASCAR's efforts to help control costs (with the COT program, for example), the one consistent principle behind auto racing is, "Speed costs money." One estimate suggests that it costs a team a quarter of a million bucks just to unload the car at the track for one race.

(Last year, when MWR was about to go under, Waltrip actually based his decision on whether he'd take tires for a late-race pit stop on the fact that they'd save money if they saved the tires instead of using them.)

With companies around the country laying off employees, that $20 million is becoming harder to find.

The big-time, long-term deals like the 48's Lowe's Home Improvement sponsorship, or the #24's Dupont association, seem to be going the way of the dinosaur; even Dale Earnhardt, Jr., the sport's most popular driver, has a shared sponsorship deal this year.

Smaller teams will continue to disappear under these conditions. How long, for example, can EM Motorsports continue to field the 08 Dodge for Johnny Sauter, when the car is covered by FUBAR, an energy drink no one will ever confuse with Powerade, Monster, or Red Bull? Already, the team has withdrawn from races, presumably because it couldn't afford to run.

When was the last time the Chicago Cubs didn't play because they couldn't afford to travel?

The economic climate can't change fast enough to suit racing teams. If it doesn't, the field's gonna be a lot smaller for next years' Cup races.

by Brian Tetzler

Today, car owner Rick Hendrick announced that veteran driver Mark Martin will drive the 5 car in 2009. Martin wants to make one last run at a championship after having been the bridesmaid four times. It sounds like a match made in Heaven.

But this is a bad move.

It's not that Martin isn't a great driver. He is. It's not that Martin won't help the 5 team get better. He can.

It's that Casey Mears had to get screwed for this to happen.

In the two short years that Mears drove for Hendrick Motorsports, they changed his crew chief, they changed his team, they changed his car number, and they changed his sponsor. How is anyone supposed to be successful when the rug keeps being pulled from underneath them?

Mears has his only career win with Hendrick. It was a fuel mileage victory at the Coca-Cola 600 last year. You could tell how happy the organization was, just by seeing the other drivers and crew members congratulate Mears in Victory Lane. Where did that feeling go?

I hope Mears will land a spot with a solid team--a team that will give this young and talented man a chance to drive, without all the distractions he put up with at HMS. I hope he shows NASCAR you can't hold a driver like him down.

Ask anybody in the garage--a driver, a crew chief, a tire changer, whoever--and they will all tell you Mark Martin is a class act. He wanted to retire several years ago, and at the last minute, he was asked to drive a little longer, to help out Jack Roush. He did, and then he moved to part time so he could race and still spend time with his family.

Martin has been a friend to the Hendrick family for many years, which is why this move shouldn't surprise anyone. He drove the Nationwide car for Hendrick last year. He gave JR Motorsports its first win in Las Vegas this year.

But can Mark Martin make the chase? Can he endure a 38-event season, after racing just part time the past few years?

Everyone felt for him when he almost won the Daytona 500 in 2007. What's going to happen if he doesn't make the chase? Wouldn't that be a bitter pill to swallow?

A couple of sources are reporting that Teresa Earnhardt is looking to sell Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated, and one of the prime candidates to buy the team is Max Siegel, the team's President of Global Operations. She's reportedly hired Bear, Stearns to dispose of the entire operation.

The deal, according to one source, is that Teresa would get between $115 and $130 million for the company, but she would keep all rights to the "Dale Earnhardt" and "Intimidator" trademarks, which would keep her in the money for a good long time.

The buyer would get the DEI property and race teams.

This could well be the best thing Teresa Earnhardt has done for the team since she took over running it after the death of Dale Earnhardt in 2001. Derided as a "deadbeat owner' by driver Kevin Harvick (who owns Kevin Harvick, Inc and has teams racing in three series himself) because she is rarely seen at the racetrack, there is little positive that anyone can say for Teresa's business acumen since the death of Senior, except that she's kept the Earnhardt mechandise gravy train rolling.

Under her watch, DEI has made a series of mis-steps, and the company was headed into a downward sprial until the arrival of Siegel in 2006. Even after his installation, friction between Teresa and marquee driver Dale Junior (their relationship "ain't no bed of roses," Junior said at the time) ended in his leaving the company, a move that Junior Nation widely regards as her fault and which they're not in a hurry to forget or forgive.

Fan venom against her is reportedly one of the reasons the already-reclusive Teresa wants out. Taking the high road, Junior asked that the "Reason #88? Step-Mom" billboard at Texas Motor Speedway be changed earlier this year, but the fact that track owner Eddie Gossage would even propose a sign with a side-swipe at a team owner speaks volumes about Teresa's reputation.

The new owner will find himself owner of a team in flux: Mark Martin is leaving the 8 car in the hands of relative newbie Aric Almirola, the 01 car driven this year by Regan Smith has no primary sponsor (and will be cut next year if that can't be remedied), Paul Menard's primary sponsor, his father, may be preparing to jettison Cup racing sponsorships, which would leave the 15 car blank, and Martin Truex, Jr is in serious danger of missing the chase after a lackluster season and a COT rules infraction that will cost the team 150 points. Truex has yet to sign his new contract and may be looking to leave DEI.

The sale would make Junior Nation happy. It might also make the company a viable contender again, depending on who buys it. Last year, Tony Stewart said DEI without Junior would become nothing more than "a museum," and while that didn't happen immediately, it still might, if the ship isn't righted.

Selling ought to make Teresa happy, too, since it's been clear that running a NASCAR racing team hasn't been all that interesting to her for some time. Her financial future is pretty well ensured if she keeps the rights to the Earnhardt trademarks, and that's all she really needs.

I'm not a big fan of the Car of Today.

But I am growing tired of race fans with short memories complaining that the COT makes for boring races because one car jumps out for a four-to-five second lead.

"I want racing like it was," they whine. "Like the classic NASCAR days."

Okay.

Time was, leaders led by multiple laps, not multiple seconds.

Watch the replays of old races on ESPN, or better yet, catch an episode of "Back in the Day."

Heck, in 1973, Yarborough and Petty lapped the field three times at Charlotte before Cale won the race . In '72, A.J. Foyt won the Daytona 500 by five miles.

Many other Cup races recorded drivers winning by multiple laps.

Then again, in '75, Bobby Allison was two laps back at Darlington when leaders David Pearson and Benny Parsons crashed with 40 laps to go--that race ended with Allison beating Darrell Waltrip by just one car length.

Those examples are all from a time most races fans now call the era of "real racing."

Maybe it's this generation's video-game mentality--they want to see a leader change every few minutes or they lose interest.

Whatever the reason, saying the COT races aren't as exciting as the old days because the front-runners take such a big lead just isn't true.

You might reasonably expect to see another rant about the "race" at the Brickyard in this space.

But you won't. Don't get me wrong--I didn't like the ten-lap heat format that developed; I was looking for a real race, too, and wish we'd seen one. Still, that's not my topic today.

Or I could point out that NASCAR's decision to penalize Toyota for coming up with more horsepower in the Nationwide series engines--legally--defeats the purpose of racing. (As Darrell Waltrip said, "When I complained about Ford engines making more power when I raced one year, they told me, 'Go buy yourself one, then.'")

Lots of people are writing about those things, though. I want to go back a few days, to Rusty Wallace's ill-advised attempt to...explain...the Ryan Newman-Roger Penske split.

Rusty, you will recall, is now employed as a NASCAR color analyst for ESPN. He has had some trouble with this role, since he calls Nationwide Series races, and his son Steve, who races in that series, spent a lot of last season--and some of this one--wrecking, frequently taking other drivers with him.

Rusty's initial on-air reaction was (usually) to blame someone or something else for the problems, but by the end of the year, he would simply stop talking when Steve crashed.

It's to bad he didn't do that last week, when it occurred to him to tell reporters "exactly how [the split] went down."

Despite the fact that Newman--and the company--claimed his departure was mutual, Rusty said, "I'll clear this leaving thing up," at an ESPN press conference. "He [Newman] didn't leave. I've read many, many stories that said that," Wallace said. "Roger Penske called Ryan Newman up to his offices and said, 'I don't need your services next year.' Ryan Newman didn't come to him and say, 'I'm leaving.' "

He went on to tell the assembled press that "You all need to write that."

Naturally, Newman disputed the statement. "I don't what Rusty's grounds are or what he's trying to prove by saying that. That wasn't the case -- point blank. Roger and I decided mutually to not continue, and it was more my decision than it was his, I would say," Newman said. "I said our goals didn't align, and for that reason and that reason alone, we decided to not continue after 2008."

Unfortunately for Rusty, Roger Penske agreed. "[Newman] made a decision, we made it together that he'd move on," he said. "There was no issue between the two of us. There's some reports that there was and that's not the case." The press release issued on July 14 had also said the decision was mutual.

So just who does Rusty think he is? He and Ryan Newman have never gotten along, even when they were teammates at Penske.

But now, he's not just another loudmouth driver in the garage, trashtalking. He is supposed to be a professional broadcaster, covering drivers like Newman, and that means it is inappropriate (to say the least) for him to publicly step into the middle of a situation like this.

There's been no indication that Rusty is going to suffer any official repercussion for his comments, which is not all that surprising. After all, ESPN has no problem allowing current race team owners to be broadcasters for races in which their own teams compete. (Can you imagine how much Marge Schott would have loved that?) It does not appear that the network cares all that much about propriety.

Maybe he'll learn to keep his mouth shut on such matters in the future, at least while he's working for ESPN.

On the other hand, it's Rusty Wallace, so that may be asking too much.