April 9, 2009
By Doug Demmons
The No. 8 team at Earnhardt-Ganassi is shutting down. Aric Almirola is without a ride.
No one is surprised by this -- or at least no one should be. This has been coming all season. You can’t run a car without sponsors for long. You can piece together race-by-race deals at discount prices for just so long before you finally have to face reality and pull the plug.
Still, it’s a sad sight to behold. One less car on the entry list. Forty or 50 fewer employees at a company that will soon be the subject of a new movie -- “Honey, I Shrunk The Race Team.”
A year ago at this time DEI and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, fielded seven teams between them. The new merged version fields two.
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Earnhardt-Ganassi Pulls Plug On No. 8 Team
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Dario Franchitti, Reed Sorenson, Regan Smith, Paul Menard and now Aric Almirola are gone. Martin Truex Jr. and Juan Pablo Montoya remain.
Just cold economic reality. Even racers, who are notorious for putting their hearts before their wallets, eventually have to face it.
More people need to start facing that reality. Or at least start talking about it and coming up with solutions rather than hoping and praying things will turn around on their own. Because they won’t. Because the bottom hasn’t been hit yet.
The 800-pound gorilla that the NASCAR community doesn’t seem to want to face is the impending bankruptcy filing of General Motors and/or Chrysler. What that means to automaker involvement in NASCAR is anybody’s guess.
Bankruptcy doesn’t mean a company quits trying to market its products so it is unlikely that a bankrupt GM or Chrysler would pull the plug on NASCAR entirely.
But things will never be the same between NASCAR and America’s auto industry. The days of the old symbiotic relationship have already ended. For the sport to survive and thrive into the future it is time to start thinking about the shape of the new relationship.
The old model is breaking down. Fans are not showing up at the track and they aren’t tuning in on TV. Some of that is the fault of the poor economy but not all of it. Some of it is caused by the disconnect between what is seen on the track and what is available in the showroom.
No, we’ll never go back to the days of buying a car off a showroom floor, adding a roll cage and taking it to the track. But we can start to re-connect what is raced to what is bought. And technology is a good place to start.
NASCAR, which only recently switched from leaded gasoline and still uses carburetors, needs to prepare for the day when gasoline no longer powers most of the cars on the road. It’s at least a good place to start.
NASCAR needs to decide whether it will be an anachronism or a pioneer. And it needs to decide pretty soon.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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