Posts tagged ChipGanassi at FanHouse

Warning: Objects in this post may be the only way to successfully live through the NASCAR off-season. For best results, read rearview mirror early and often.

Driver: Juan Pablo Montoya
Team: No. 42 Chip Ganassi Dodge
'08 Final Standing: 25th (-3355)
Best Race: Aaron's 499 at Talladega (2nd-place)
Worst Race: Dickies 500 at Texas (43rd-place)

Season in a box: The most telling reason why Juan Pablo Montoya found himself finishing 25th in the season standings may have been the turmoil Chip Ganassi Racing was feeling financially.

Chip Ganassi has found a way to make his team not as pathetic as before and Dale Earnhardt Inc. has found a way to keep grasping at being a relevant Sprint Cup Series team.

That method? Join the two programs together to create strange bedfellows, cut costs and hope that a math equation of subpar plus subpar finally equals something good.

Yep, Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates will be teaming up to make a four-car team in 2009.

Two of motorsports' biggest names – Earnhardt and Ganassi – will launch a four-car team beginning in 2009 through the combination of the motorsports operations of Dale Earnhardt, Inc. (DEI) and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, Inc. (CGRFS). NASCAR stars Martin Truex Jr. and Juan Pablo Montoya will drive the Nos. 1 and 42 respectively and future star Aric Almirola will be behind the wheel of the No. 8. The driver of the No. 41 will be named in the near future.

For those of you keeping track at home, this combination of forces currently includes 4 cars, 3 drivers and 2.5 sponsorships. Let's hope that changes before 2009.

Additionally, the overriding rumor is that Chevrolet will be the manufacturer for the organization, mainly because it's very likely Dale Earnhardt would rise from his grave to haunt anything bearing his name that doesn't bear a bow tie. Dodge, Ganassi's current partner, is apparently being shoved out.

It's not too difficult to get the fact that the world as a whole is entering a pretty tough time financially. And when these things happen, some of the first industries to take a hit include entertainment and sports, thanks to people being more fiscally responsible.

We've already seen NASCAR ticket sales dropping pretty incredibly over the past few weeks -- last weekend's race at Atlanta was a glaring reminder -- and the next shoe to fall in the NASCAR economic climate appears to be sponsorship of race teams.

So teams, faced with the idea of racing in the near future with decreased funding, are apparently looking at making drastic cuts to the number of employees in the race shops. And when I say drastic, I'm not kidding.

You can now call Reed Sorenson the former Chip Ganassi Racing driver:

Reed Sorenson isn't waiting for Chip Ganassi Racing to figure out the Car of Tomorrow.

The 22-year-old driver signed a multiyear contract to join Gillett Evernham Motorsports next season, where he'll join Kasey Kahne and Elliott Sadler.

Sorenson said his decision to leave Ganassi, where he began his NASCAR career as a precocious 18-year-old, was difficult but necessary.

"I'm going over here to try to make myself a better racecar driver," Sorenson said during a conference call Tuesday shortly after the announcement. "I wanted to be more competitive and I wanted to have some more opportunities to win races and things like that."

For Sorenson fans, this is great news, but for Patrick Carpentier fans it's probably not.

After blowing up colorful projectiles in name of freedom on the 4th, hang out with FanHouse for the Coke Zero 400 Live Blog Saturday night at 7:45pm/ET.

Did Chip Ganassi give up on Dario Franchitti as a Sprint Cup driver?

All signs point that way after Tuesday's announcement that Franchitti's No. 40 team is now a defunct asset in the Ganassi racing stable.

The team owner cited a lack of funding as the reason why the No. 40 won't be competing anymore in 2008, effective for this weekend's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona. The team has lacked full-time sponsorship all season, but has seemed to get by with a little help from multiple sources, including Fastenal, Tums, Target, and others.

But if Robby Gordon or Yates Racing can race all season with less than perfect sponsorship packages, how in the world can Chip Ganassi -- a true racing mogul -- not afford to run a team through at least one of NASCAR's crown jewel events?

To me, Ganassi's unwillingness to keep Franchitti in through Daytona shows that he isn't satisfied with Franchitti's performance in his first season in Sprint Cup. Franchitti's stats of no Top-5s, no Top-10s, and an average finish of 34th don't do much in his defense.

Regardless, its still surprising to me to know that Ganassi is essentially giving up on a Sprint Cup program for a guy he knew would struggle. A reason that Ganassi gave last fall when he fired David Stremme from the No. 40 ride was that he felt Franchitti either had sponsorship dollars with him or could bring them in more easily.

Then, it looked like Stremme was the victim, but now its looking like he got out at the right time from what seems to be an imploding Ganassi racing.

No worries for Mr. Franchitti though. He still has a backup gig of fighting crime without pants.

For any employee of Chip Ganassi's three NASCAR racing teams, it's a good thing that the owner is over a 1,000 miles away at the IndyCar event in St. Petersburg, Fla.

His words, though, about the performance of the No. 40, No. 41, and No. 42 teams could be well heard in the garage area of Texas Motor Speedway.

Ganassi sure didn't mince any words when talking about it on Saturday:

"Frankly, there are 46 cars there and if you can't beat three of them, that's pretty pathetic," Ganassi said on Sirius Satellite Radio. "I certainly have all the faith in the world in (Franchitti's) driving abilities. I don't think it's that. The fact of the matter is, we didn't give him a car that was capable of doing it."

Heading into Texas, Juan Pablo Montoya's team is 17th in points, Reed Sorenson's is 26th, and Dario Franchitti -- who didn't make Sunday's race -- sits 37th. Teamwork is the problem, Ganassi says.

"When you say 'this team' you hit the nail on the head – we're not working as a team," Ganassi said. "You can't have guys that are fast and guys that are slow. It doesn't make any sense. These guys, these teams are not talking to each other, they are not working together, they are not using all the resources that are available to them. That's how you end up in a fix like this."

You've got to love this brutal honesty. Ganassi indeed hits the nail on the head himself with the summary of his team. They have frankly been mediocre for a long while and with the sponsorship and racing experience a guy like Ganassi has, he knows when a team is reaching its potential.

And in this case, he knows that his Sprint Cup teams aren't cutting it. It should be an interesting week around the CGR shop.

A few weeks ago, you could find each of these drivers in the Top 10 in NASCAR Nextel Cup Standings. For two of them, that is no more, and for one, two more weeks of horrendous finishes would make the three 3 for 3. Here's how it happened -- and cue the Tom Petty.

Jeff Burton
Following his win four races ago at Texas, Burton sat just 8 points behind point leader Jeff Gordon and looking poised to continue his surge to the top. The next week at Phoenix, Burton's team never got a good handle on his Impala, but managed a 13th-place finish. At Talladega, a crash took Burton out of the race after qualifying 42nd and then Sunday at Richmond, the team blew a motor.

Result: Burton now sits 5th in points, 339 points behind Gordon.