Potentially Earth-Shattering Racing News

Word tonight from the influential automotive blog Autoextremist that one of the big three auto manufacturers is making plans to withdraw from NASCAR. It isn't known yet whether it would be a withdrawal from only Nextel Cup or from all NASCAR series. The link to the article is here, but since Autoextremist links have very short shelf lives, I'll summarize.

All of the manufacturers spend around $140 million a year on their NASCAR operations. What has happened over the past few decades is that NASCAR race cars have become less and less related to their highway counterparts, a trend that has accelerated rapidly in recent years as NASCAR plans to introduce the "Car of Tomorrow" next year (the COT, as it's known, is 100% NASCAR spec and manufacturers are differentiated by headlight stickers, more or less). This trend of dissimilarity has led to the law of "race on Sunday, sell on Monday" no longer applying. Basically, it appears that a major player has finally seen the light and realized that there's little reason to spend boo-koo $$$ for such a small and dwindling return.

The Autoextremist article says that the yet-unnamed manufacturer will reallocate it's resources, and it's future racing operations will go to prototype racing and production-based racing. In other words, it will only race in series' where it gets important technical benefits or races cars that buyers can identify with, or both. In NASCAR, with it's 1960's tech and cookie-cutter fake cars, it gets neither.

Given the fact I've been screaming about this for years, this is better than great news...it had might as well be Christmas morning. Especially if this manufacturer is who I think it is.

I think it's GM. Why? Reading between the lines in the Autoextremist article led me to that conclusion, but beyond that, GM is the one out of the Big Three that is truly hemorrhaging money and is in the midst of a process to change it's entire state of being. I think GM has been doing some very smart things lately, and this would be another smart move. If GM pulls out of NASCAR, NASCAR dies...it's that simple. And personally, I think NASCAR is on it's last legs anyhow, due to it's genericars and boring racing. How brilliant is it for GM to allow Toyota to invest so many resources into a NASCAR program only to pull the plug on them when the just get started? Just awesome.

Now it could still be Ford or Dodge, or simply a false report. But as of now I think it's the real deal, and I believe (and hope, and pray) that it's GM. Auto racing is too wonderful of a sport to be dominated by something as ridiculous as NASCAR, and hopefully, this will seal it's fate.