FanHouse DEI

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.

NASCAR's two biggest names -- Earnhardt and Petty -- might fall under the same banner in the near future in the latest sign of how NASCAR's middle-of-the-road teams are struggling to keep pace with multi-car and mega-supported teams in the Sprint Cup Series.

While Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty never were true rivals on-track, the competition between each drivers' stats always persisted. Earnhardt never matched Petty's incredible 200-win total, but in 1992, he reached seven championships in NASCAR's top division to tie "The King".

Knowing that, it seems especially weird that at least one team representative acknowledge this weekend that Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Petty Enterprises have had discussions about joining forces.

"I think in this time, in this sport, anybody running from one team to three teams is talking to somebody, and anybody with four teams is trying to get to eight teams," said Loomis, vice president of race operations for Petty Enterprises.

Loomis likened it to what has been taking place throughout the financial world in recent weeks. Organizations such as Petty Enterprises and DEI, which are short on sponsorship dollar commitments for next season, are trying to align themselves with larger companies that are on more solid financial ground.

So there you have it.

It's been an interesting week in the NASCAR Sprint Cup world, and by interesting I mean pretty doggone slow. It feels like every team in the business -- especially the ones in the Chase -- just put their collective heads down and went to work for a week without distraction.

Luckily, Friday afternoon brought something to talk about as the Sprint Cup teams headed to Dover for second race of the Chase for the Championship, and luckily for a struggling Jeff Gordon, he earned the right to start out front for Sunday's race.

Leading up to the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, word was that Martin Truex Jr. was going to re-sign with Dale Earnhardt Inc. for 2009, and potentially longer. Truex, though, wasn't happy about the report done by ESPN.com's David Newton:

"It's (expletive). I don't know what the hell (the reporter) is talking about. He doesn't know what he's talking about," Truex said.

It turns out, though, that Newton was ultimately right. Whether or not he was right at the time, though, is still up in the air.

Regardless, Martin Truex Jr. is expected to announce later Friday that he will be staying at DEI in the No. 1 car for at least one more year. In contract terms, Truex actually just accepted the DEI's proposal to pick up the one-year option for '09 that was already in his previous deal.

Truex's move takes away at least a fraction of the rumor game being currently played throughout the Sprint Cup garage area, as he has been rumored for any number of open seats in 2009 including Stewart-Haas Racing, Penske Racing, and Richard Childress Racing.

Mark Martin had a terrifically fast car for the second week in a row at Pocono Raceway Sunday afternoon.

Pit problems, though, kept him from battling his No. 8 DEI Chevrolet for its first win of 2008 in the closing laps of the Pennsylvania 500.

Martin started second in Sunday's race and jumped out to the lead early on as part of his race-high 55 laps led in the 500-mile event, but a problem with the socket on the air gun that removes the lug nuts from the tires early in the race got put Martin further and further back on two consecutive pit stops.

Crew chief Tony Gibson seemed a little flabbergasted after Martin started second and seemed to have the car to beat.

"You can't run the same socket all year long," Gibson said. "You've got to eventually change it because it will break. Something about it hung up on a nut. It wasn't [the crew's] fault. They didn't do anything wrong.

"It kind of threw us out of our gameplan and got us off sync on fuel. But, hey, we had the car to beat here today by far, and that was a good day for us. I wish we would have won it. Should have won it. But it didn't happen."

The team's new gameplan involved Martin staying out while the rest of the leaders came to pit road just before the red flag came out on lap 128 for rain.

FanHouse's Geoffrey Miller is on location & blogging away at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Sunday's 15th Running of the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.

Martin Truex Jr. appears set to end the rumor mill swirling around his future.

ESPN.com's David Newton reported on Saturday that "several sources" are confirming that Truex will now stay right where he's at -- with Dale Earnhardt Inc. -- until at least 2010:

The 28-year-old New Jersey native has agreed in principle to a two-year deal that will keep him at Dale Earnhardt Inc. through the 2010 season, multiple sources close to the situation told ESPN.com on Saturday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Sources said an official announcement is expected any day, and that details with multiple sponsors remain to be finalized.

Truex, asked if he has an agreement, said: "We're getting there, yeah. Things are going well right. I'm pretty happy. I just want to think about racing this weekend."

That quote from Truex seems to seal the deal for me, as he definitely didn't make any attempt to deny the report. He pretty much gave the "yeah, that's been correctly reported but I can't say anything yet so I'm going to get back in my race car and stay away from you media-types"-style answer.

I'm glad Truex has got his deal seemingly worked out with DEI, a team where he'll remain as the No. 1 driver in the camp. I don't think, however, that re-signing with the team will lead him towards a Sprint Cup championship any time soon.

McMurray Grows Weary of Constant Free Agency Reports

It must be tough to have the media firing you from a high-profile job before you get the news, unless, you know, the media is wrong.

Tony Stewart apparently just had to scratch that itch -- you know, that itch that Dale Earnhardt Jr. scratched enough in 2007 to find his way to Hendrick Motorsports.

And now that we know that Tony (or at least we think we know) won't be piloting the No. 20 Toyota in 2009 for Joe Gibbs Racing in favor of owning his own team, we need to look at Stewart the team owner/teammate. In other words, who is going to work best with Stewart as a teammate in 2009?

Let's start with the most-rumored candidate, "Flyin' Ryan" himself:

Ryan Newman - Newman seems to make the most sense for a number of reasons. Newman is a fellow Hoosier like Stewart, has a dirt track and open-wheel background just like Stewart, and he's in the final year of his contract with a struggling Penske. And, oh yeah, dude is fast.

Newman has 43 career poles and 13 wins -- including the 2008 Daytona 500. You put Newman into a fast car, and he can put you in victory lane. He's also got some pretty sweet wrestling moves, too. The only thing he doesn't bring is a sponsor package, though it wouldn't be hard to find one.

Martin Truex Jr. - Truex could be next great defector from the idling ship that is Dale Earnhardt Inc. With one career win coming last summer at Dover, Truex made the Chase for the Championship in 2007 but his chances don't look as good this time around.

After receiving a strong penalty from NASCAR Tuesday afternoon, Martin Truex Jr.'s shot at making the Chase for the Championship for the second time in two years took a deep hit.

It wasn't the 150 owner points that hurt, not the $100,000 fine, or even the loss of his crew chief and car chief for the next six races, instead, it was the 150 driver points that Truex lost thanks to his No. 1 car failing inspection last Thursday at Daytona due to a roof height violation.

As if it wasn't bad enough, NASCAR confiscated that car, forcing Truex to miss practice and race a backup car.

But that 150-point penalty is the killer. The penalty completely wiped all 112 points that Truex earned in Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona and then some. In other words, the penalty is worse than if Truex would have missed a race.

The damage dropped Truex 238 points behind 12th-place Tony Stewart, but the biggest difference is that instead of sitting 14th in the point standings, Truex now sits 18th, leaving six drivers ahead of him that are fighting for the same spot.

Truex is now in a very, very tough spot if he wants to make the Chase, having to average at this point a finish 30 points higher each race than Stewart, which translates to between 5 and 11 spots higher in each of the last 8 races before the Chase.

It's a tough penalty, and it deeply affected Truex's run at the championship in the playoff, but its simply another wake up call to teams to be extremely stringent with the way they build their race cars. Is a penalty like that fair? Well, thats a discussion for another day.

Check out all of the NASCAR Fanhouse Daytona Speedweeks Coverage.

Wednesday wasn't happiness and joy for several teams in the Sprint Cup Series garage area at Daytona.

For starters, the practice times were impacted by rain showers that threw a wrench in the day's schedule. Luckily for them, though, the rains held off enough for engine problems to show their face during practice instead of during Thursday afternoon's Gatorade Duels.

All of the Hendrick Motorsports cars were affected -- Earnhardt, Gordon, Johnson & Mears -- as well as several Toyotas. Tony Stewart, Dale Jarrett, J.J. Yeley, A.J. Allmendinger and Kyle Busch all changed out their Toyota powerplants.

In addition, Scott Riggs, racing a fifth engine from Haas/CNC Racing swapped out his motor.

Hendrick Motorsports head engine builder Jeff Andrews blamed the issue on a bad coating on the lifters. Richie Gilmore, the engine builder for Richard Childress Racing and Dale Earnhardt Inc. -- a team that had no problems -- explained how the coating works:

"If the coating wears off just a little bit, it's like glass and then you have steel on steel and you have that coating going through your engine," said Richie Gilmore, who runs the joint engine program between Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Richard Childress Racing.

None of Gilmore's engines had lifter problems, but the issue had him and other teams scrambling to check their equipment following practice.

"Everybody's going to be pulling stuff apart and looking at it, and it might be a bigger issue," Gilmore said.

The coating isn't a manufacturer specific product, so its likely that Hendrick and the Toyota teams used the same product and a bad batch caused the problems.