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In the past couple of years, we have seen Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Geoffrey Bodine, Gary Betchel, the Stavolas, and others shut down or seriously cut back their Winston Cup operations. Why? Multicar teams like Roush Racing, Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing, etc draw the sponsors away from some of the smaller teams. With these huge sponsors, they are able to spend more money on their operations and are able to dominate on the track. You don’t see the little guys as much as you used to since they just don’t have the money. Ricky Rudd, one of the few single car teams left in Winston Cup knows all too well what its like to to loose his sponsor to a large team. Cal Wells, the Cart owner, has drawn away Tide to his soon to be large team. In a typical WC field, almost 2/3 of the drivers have at least 1 teammate. Everyone who has won a race in WC this year have at least 1 teammate. The teams that are still single car operations, Tyler Jet Motorsports, Bill Davis Racing, and Rudd’s team are making sure that when 2000 comes, their drivers will have teammates just so they won’t fall behind. We are just starting to see this in the Busch Series. Jeff Green and Jason Keller (Progressive Motorsports) have two decent size sponsors (at least for BGN) and are becoming two of the dominant drivers. Sure there are a few successful single car teams in BGN, most notably Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Matt Kenseth, but how long will that last. They are both going to Winston Cup next year and then the team cars probably will take over. The well financed teams both in Winston Cup and in the Busch Grand National Series will continue to expand, putting more team cars in the field, making it very difficult for the little guy to get into the field. A little while back Jack Roush made a “joke” about saying how he was going to field a team of 43 cars. Nobody laughed. Maybe this isn’t so far fetched.
Commentary by
Bill Meade
Billy66FD @aol.com
