Ford, Chevy and Toyota
‘All-American’ NASCAR Racing Will Be a Thing of the Past
The face of NASCAR’s fan base has undergone a makeover during the past decade, with the stereotypical beer-guzzling, fist-pumping wage-earners making room in the grandstands for wine-sipping, white-collar professionals and growing numbers of women, teens and toddlers.
At a far more rapid pace, the face of NASCAR’s on-track competition is about to change, too, as Toyota prepares to enter the Nextel Cup ranks in 2007, becoming the first Japanese nameplate to battle alongside stock-car racing’s Fords, Chevrolets and Dodges.
That makes Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600, a stock-car racing tradition that dates from 1960, NASCAR’s last Memorial Day weekend spectacle with an “All-American” automotive lineup. And opinion is mixed, in the garage and the grandstands, about what this portends for a sport that reveres its past as it hurtles toward its future.
Some team owners say they’re worried that Toyota will spend so lavishly to win that it will ramp up the cost of racing for everyone — driving up salaries, in particular, and budgets for research and development. Others worry that NASCAR officials, eager to make stock-car racing’s newest investor feel at home, will bend the rules in Toyota’s favor. And there’s evidence that some fans will resent the presence of a foreign nameplate, even though Dodge, which currently fields roughly 30 percent of NASCAR’s field, is German-owned by DaimlerChrysler.
The focus of these concerns, at least at the moment, is veteran racer Michael Waltrip, who announced earlier this year that he’ll own a two-car Toyota team in 2007. He took delivery on his first Camry racecar Saturday, shortly before strapping into a Dodge for a practice session at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. In an interview beforehand, Waltrip bristled at the NASCAR owners who have been bellyaching about Toyota’s deep pockets, taking a swipe at Jack Roush, who owns five Fords in Sunday’s race and won NASCAR championships in 2003 and 2004.
“They’re just trying to put an incredibly unfair spin on the way that Toyota is coming into the sport because they’re threatening their kingdom,” said Waltrip, 43, arguing that Toyota’s arrival will benefit everyone. “I don’t understand why people don’t say, ‘Man, Toyota is so cool! Michael is starting a team, and here comes a bunch of [new] guys!’ Jack Roush will be able to get more sponsorship dollars for his cars because Toyota is here now. More people are going to wonder what’s going on in NASCAR: ‘Wow! Toyota is there! Let’s tune on the TV and watch!’ ”
From the moment the green flag fell on NASCAR’s first race in 1949, it has been critical to have dueling brands of automobiles in the sport. Dueling nameplates give fans another thing to hang their rooting interests on. While some pull for particular drivers, others pull for Chevy or Ford or, over the years, Hudson, Chrysler, Plymouth and Buick.
“The more cars you have in the sport, the better representation you have of what people actually drive on the street,” said NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter. And that’s the essence of what NASCAR sells: The myth that the racecars that compete on Sundays, which are “stock” in appearance only, are close kin to the cars for sale in American showrooms on Monday.
And that brings up rationale No. 2. Given the current financial struggles of General Motors (maker of Chevy) and Ford, which in the last six months announced plans to lay off 60,000 workers between them, NASCAR is probably wise to hedge its bets by revising its decades-old rule that “only American-made cars” can compete in the sport. Today, that rule restricts competition to “American-assembled” cars.
Enter Toyota’s Camry, the hottest-selling car in the United States for eight of the last nine years, which is assembled at a plant in Georgetown, Ky.
Kyle Petty, who owns and drives NASCAR’s No. 45 Dodge, dismisses concerns that costs are about to soar. It didn’t happen when Dodge returned to racing in 2000, he notes, and it won’t happen next year.
“It was the same concerns then: ‘They’re going to steal team members! They’re going to steal the good drivers! It’s going to cost us more to race in a single year because Dodge is coming into the sport!’ ” Petty said. “That didn’t happen.”
Car owner Rick Hendrick, whose Chevys have won five NASCAR titles, says he welcomes the competition as long as NASCAR applies its rulebook evenly. As founder of one of the nation’s larger car dealers, Hendrick Automotive Groups (which sells more than 20 makes of domestic and foreign cars), Hendrick has no trouble seeing Toyota’s incentive in joining the stock-car ranks.
“Toyota is not in this deal because they want to go out and beat GM or Ford on the racetrack,” Hendrick said. “They want to sell products. They are big-time in the automobile business in this country, and they see this as a marketing tool that they can’t ignore.”
So much the better for NASCAR, said Hunter.
“”In the end, the more healthy the manufacturers are, the more healthy NASCAR is,” Hunter said. “If there were no car manufacturers, there wouldn’t be a NASCAR. But somebody is going to be making cars for sale. And as long as that happens, then NASCAR is going to have some wind in its sails.”
Note: Carl Edwards grabbed the lead away from Casey Mears on a restart with six laps to go and pulled away to win the Busch Series race Saturday night at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Nextel Cup drivers Jamie McMurray and Tony Stewart were taken to a hospital for evaluations following separate accidents early in the race. Both were released after quick checkups, and both were cleared to race in the Coca-Cola 600. www.washingtonpost.com
