At the dawn of another auto racing season, a simple truth is more obvious than ever: Racing, arguably more than any other sport, is a big business.
A huge business. A business that’s as much about selling cars and tires, cigarettes and beer, candy and cereal and laundry detergent as it is about winning races.
The days of the good ol’ boys, the descendants of the moonshiners, coming out of the hills and rumbling around some dirt track in their stock cars and then mingling pleasantly with adoring fans are long gone. As NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, its best drivers come complete with retinues, with layers of people to protect them from the public.
The days of the open-wheel drivers, the more refined clan settling down at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a month, running the world’s most famous race, then watching the winner celebrate his victory with a swig of milk–they’re just as far gone.
The Indy drivers are split into two warring factions, CART and the Indy Racing League, and the sanctioning bodies continue to compete for the hearts and wallets of the fans.
None of that should be forgotten, not for an instant, as the season’s first big race approaches with but a single dominant story line. The race is the Feb. 15 Daytona 500, and the story line is this: Ford’s drivers switching from the familiar Thunderbird to the Taurus.
Thunderbirds dominated last season’s Winston Cup Series; by season’s end, Ford drivers had won 19 of 32 races. (Chevrolet had 11 wins, 10 of them by Jeff Gordon, and Pontiac had two.) The switch was hardly predicated on poor performance. It was instead based on–big surprise–business; specifically, Ford’s decision to stop producing Thunderbirds.
The manufacturer would no longer receive residual benefits (read: increased sales) from, say, Dale Jarrett driving his No. 88 Quality Care Ford Thunderbird to victory. So the change was made to the Taurus, the best-selling American-made model in this country.
“Ford doesn’t need to be racing what they don’t sell,” driver Rusty Wallace said. “Their best-selling car is the Taurus, so it makes sense that it needs to be a race car.”
Dan Davis, director of Ford’s special vehicle operations, was just as candid: “We want to see Tauruses out there. It’s what we make, and what we sell.”
Ford made the decision last March, and it wasn’t until early September that a Taurus made its debut on a Winston Cup track.
“I can’t tell that much difference,” Bill Elliott said after turning a few laps in it at Daytona International Speedway. “But until you actually get these things running in a race and we get a race under our belt, I don’t think we can tell what we’re up against.”
What they were up against most was a tight time frame, one that grew shorter as Ford’s racing arm waited for NASCAR to approve the new car’s design and modifications.
Many teams, especially those with financial limitations, would refuse to start building until that approval came, and that meant they had little time to prepare when the OK finally did arrive in late December.
Thus they also had little time to prepare for this month’s testing sessions at Daytona, and it’s no surprise that mixed results have been rolling in.
Tauruses driven by Wallace and Kenny Irwin would turn laps faster than any of those turned by the Chevy Monte Carlos. But in general, the Monte Carlos have been running a half-mile an hour faster than the majority of the Tauruses.
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“We’re nervous about Daytona, no question about it,” Jeff Burton said.
Robin Pemberton, Wallace’s crew chief, also preaches patience.
“We haven’t run in race conditions yet, and I really believe it will take six to eight races to really figure (the car) out,” he said. “This car has the potential to be a great race car. But the thing that has put everybody behind is that it is an 18-month or two-year project that we’ve had to put together in six months, and the learning curve has been very steep for all the race teams.”
Patience is a rare virtue in a business that relies on speed and is built on competitiveness.
The rush to switch is expected to produce this unusual site at Daytona: The vast majority of Ford drivers in Tauruses, but a few–two or three, probably–still in Thunderbirds. “We’d like to see them all running Tauruses, but we know there are teams that don’t have very much of a choice. There are some trams that just aren’t ready yet,” Ford’s Davis said.
“All we want from the teams is an honest effort to run the Taurus. If there are some circumstances where they can’t do that, some reason that makes sense, we understand that.”