My goodness. NASCAR fans are being quite the panicky lot lately. With GM and Chrysler determined to try and dig their way out of the problem they dug themselves into, the question of what will happen to NASCAR if something happens to the sponsoring manufacturers has been weighing heavily on the minds of NASCAR fans all season long. I’ve been avoiding writing about this subject, hoping that it would go away or the problem would resolve itself. But, alas, it hasn’t, so here I am.
You want to know what will happen to NASCAR in the aftermath of two of the sport’s four manufacturers having severe economic problems (for the tl;dr crowd)? Almost nothing in the short term, slightly more in the medium term, maybe bigger and potentially even better changes over the long haul.
Let me debunk some of the nightmare scenarios that aren’t going to happen. NASCAR is not going to fold. NASCAR will continue with or without manufacturer support. In the massively-unlikely scenario that GM and Dodge both somehow go completely “Tango Uniform” (family blog, don’t search for that), NASCAR will continue to survive.
The disconnect NASCAR fans are having is that they don’t understand the diminishing manufacturer role in NASCAR. They have the engineering money and experience to design new engines (or really just make slight improvements to existing engines, since they’re generally pretty similar to their predecessors), but they don’t construct them: the engine shops do that. The cylinder blocks and cylinder heads come from the manufacturers, but individual engine shops put the engines together and make changes as necessary.
Ford’s engines, for example, have all been based on the 351 Windsor engine for decades. They are just now taking big steps away from that with the purpose-built Ford FR9 engine which should debut later this year. But Roush and Yates put those things together, not Ford.
Let’s play out this scenario though. Let’s assume the worst-possible scenario imaginable for a second: GM completely kicks the bucket: no way to salvage the company, they just close their doors. What happens to, say, Hendrick Motorsports?
Well, nothing.
Think about it. Hendrick does all their engines in house. They get a little personnel support from Team Chevy for day-to-day, but if GM died, what would prevent Hendrick from hiring any now-jobless Chevrolet liaisons or engineers who worked with them? Last I heard, they’ve got about 100 people working in the engine shop. Why wouldn’t they just hire 25 out-of-work GM engineers to develop new engine blocks for them? Yeah, “money,” but it’d be a solid investment in the company’s future. If this situation manifested, Hendrick would find the money to make it happen.
But what about the car? There wouldn’t be a Chevy Impala anymore so they couldn’t race it, right? Well, back in 2006, Penske Racing, in a fit of irritation with the then-underperforming Dodge Charger, switched back briefly to the Dodge Intrepid. Now, the rules of NASCAR state that each car must correspond to an actual stock car that has been sold in the past two years. The Dodge Intrepid was discontinued in 2004, but Penske could continue running the Intrepid briefly because the car was still in that two-year window.
So, even if GM were to die right this second, it wouldn’t make any immediate difference on the track for Hendrick (or EGR or RCR) until about midway through the 2011 season. And even that assumes that NASCAR wouldn’t lift that particular requirement. NASCAR fudges on this kind of stuff all the time. When Ford submitted the Taurus for review, it was the first time that the production equivalent wasn’t a rear-wheel drive V8. NASCAR let it slide.
And speaking of that, the astute may be prepared to point out that NASCAR does mandate that the manufacturers are the ones to supply the engines rather than let teams purpose-build engines on their own (like the scenario I posited earlier). But if GM and Dodge disappeared, especially with the giant teams affected by that change, don’t you think NASCAR might suspend that rule as well? It wouldn’t take much for shops to be able to build and design their own engines. If NASCAR suspended the rules, most teams are only a few key personnel away from designing engines of their own.
But what about beyond that. How would NASCAR look if it were down to just two manufacturers? Or one? Or none? Well, it would definitely reshape the way NASCAR looks, that’s for sure, but it’s not the end of the world. F1 constructors each design their own chassis. If there are no manufacturers left in NASCAR to base the car’s noses on, why not let teams design them themselves? Now you’ve got teams who can take competitive advantage into their own hands once again instead of NASCAR trying to lock everything down like IROC cars in the name of parity.
The ultimate irony in the potential death of manufacturer support in NASCAR would be that teams could actually be in a position that would open up the chassis and engine to new development and changes. Changes that could finally lead to some competitive differentiation between teams.
Look, all this is to point out that even in the most far-fetched of scenarios, racing in NASCAR is going to keep going no matter what. Moreover, positive changes can come as a result of bad situations. So pretty please, with sugar on top, can we all stop panicking and go back to talking about racing again?
Tags: Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, Hendrick Motorsports, Penske Racing, Richard Childress Racing, Roush Fenway Racing, Yates Racing
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