RFR just let Edwards, a guy who should be the franchise player of your team, walk. Now the team has Stenhouse, who has done nothing in Cup, Bayne, a so far fluke Daytona 500 champion who would be out of the sport if it wasn't for Advocare (and not only that but will probably end his career relatively early due to MLS at some point) and Biffle, who can't stop choking away the Daytona 500. I have no confidence in them to do anything.
How so? the Petty/Chrysler thing sounds more like a coincidence. And a funny one at that since he experimented in drag racing. (unsuccessfully btw)
Not to mention their Nationwide/Xfinity team has been virtually useless since stenhouse raced in there. And with the addition of Sadler, who basically flunked out of cup, and Gibbs. It sure seems like improvement is not guaranteed.
Chrysler made it well known what was going on. Petty wouldn't of left NASCAR otherwise, because even then there was more money in it than drag racing.
Well, Roush does build good motors. In fact they already supply engines to a large monster truck team out here in Maryland in conjunction with Ford Racing, so they still got that. otherwise, I see road Racing as a fulltime factory team as well as building rally engines as something they should seriously consider.
JGR stuff is actually decent looking as far as I can tell. I mean, something has to hang with the JRM/Hendrick Chevys
Interesting. That explains the homologation rules of the time, although now since I brought that up, they are likely the reason we don't have outright named/funded factory teams anymore
Actually, what happened was that Ford stopped funding all racing in the early 1970's, while Chrysler basically cut funding to only Petty. Junior Johnson shut down his team in 1971 because of no funds, and NASCAR would be much smaller if he hadn't, because he got the famous call from RJ Reynolds asking to sponsor his car for millions upon millions of dollars. Winston came in, showed all of these other outside companies like Perdue Chicken, for example, that racing was a great form of advertising that catered to the customer they had in mind. By the mid 70's the top teams had abandoned straight up manufacture support and had replaced the fickle car companies with somewhat more reliable consumer companies.Interesting. That explains the homologation rules of the time, although now since I brought that up, they are likely the reason we don't have outright named/funded factory teams anymore
So basically, manufacturers got fickle in the 1970's (likely due to the crapification of cars in general post 1974 it seems) so teams went for independent companies to fund their teams instead of competing to be a lead/affiliated "Factory" team thus leading to the rise of heavily funded independent "factory" teams like what we have now but then manufacturers started pouring money back into the series by funding the larger teams and supplying similar equipment to smaller teams?
I agree for sure, but Nascar and ratings dictate that'll never happen.
Basically, although the manufactures pulling out happened 68-70 where they cut back more and more, culminating with Petty signing with Ford in '69 and the death of Holman Moody. Part of the problem also was the rise of safety advocates, Ralph Nader being the best example, forcing the companies to put more emphasis on safety and less on speed.
