Dodge Is Riding a Revival
It has been four years since Dodge announced it would return to NASCAR’s premier stock car series after an absence of more than 20 years.
Its return was an immediate success, with Bill Elliott and Stacy Compton side by side on the front row of the 2001 Daytona 500 in Dodge’s first race back.
Later, Sterling Marlin won the first of four races for Dodge in the first season. Last year, Ryan Newman won eight races and 11 poles in a Dodge Intrepid, more than any other driver. And when Rusty Wallace won last Sunday at Martinsville, Va., it was Dodge’s 21st checkered flag.
All that’s missing is a Nextel Cup championship.
“Four years ago, we set out on a six-year plan,” said Ray Evernham, the man called on to restore the DaimlerChrysler legacy that last won a championship in 1975 with Richard Petty. “The first year was a start-up, the next five were to put us on track for winning a championship. I feel like we’re on schedule.
“Any way you look at it, we’ve come a long way. When Dodge gave me the green light in October 1999 to start building a Cup car, we didn’t even own a spark plug wrench. Now we’re contenders for a championship.”
John Fernandez, Dodge’s director of motor sports operations, says this may be the year.
“After eight races, I would say we have better than an even chance this year,” Fernandez said from corporate headquarters in Detroit. “The object is to make the top 10 before the cut and right now we have two in there and four more right close.
“If you told me that we would get three in the top 10 I would be happy. We are knocking down 120 points per car per race and, historically, that is what we need to break into the top 10. After the cut, it’s wide open.”
The “cut” means that this year’s champion will be determined in a different manner than previously. After the first 26 of 36 races, the first 10 in the standings -- and any drivers within 400 points of the leader -- will race the last 10 events for the championship. No driver outside that group will be eligible.
Going into today’s Aaron’s 499 at Talladega, Ala., Wallace is the highest-ranking Dodge driver, eighth, 157 points behind leader Dale Earnhardt Jr., in a Chevrolet. Rookie Kasey Kahne is ninth, Newman 11th, Marlin 13th, Jamie McMurray 14th and Jeremy Mayfield 15th, only 287 behind Earnhardt.
“I hope one or two of my guys will be there,” said Evernham, who now has his own team with Kahne, Mayfield and a part-timer in Elliott. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there was at least one car each from out of the Evernham, Penske and Ganassi garages in the final 10.”
Roger Penske’s drivers are Wallace, Newman and rookie Brendan Gaughan. Chip Ganassi has Marlin, McMurray and Casey Mears. The other factory team is run by Petty Enterprises, with Kyle Petty and Jeff Green driving.
There are also other Dodge drivers, such as Scott Wimmer and Ken Schrader, who are not factory hires but whose teams receive technical support in a “Run With the Ram” program.
Neither Fernandez nor Evernham expects much in today’s 500-mile race, 188 laps around Talladega’s 2.66-mile high-banked oval.
“Superspeedways have murdered us, but they’ve murdered just about everyone but DEI,” Fernandez said, referring to Dale Earnhardt Inc.
DEI Chevrolets, driven by Earnhardt Jr. and Michael Waltrip, have won eight of the last 10 at Talladega and five of the last seven at Daytona, the two superspeedways where carburetor restrictor plates are used to control speeds.
“Our chances will be better when we get to California,” said Fernandez, who will be at Fontana in hopes of greeting one of his drivers in Victory Lane next Sunday. No Dodge driver has ever won at California Speedway.
“California is a lot like Michigan [International Speedway], a down-force track where there can be long green-flag runs that can create a fuel mileage race,” Evernham said from Talladega. “The speeds are so high that our main concern is drag. We can’t afford to give up our down force, but a clean body is important at Fontana.”
And what does Evernham, who joined NASCAR in 1993 as a crew chief and helped Jeff Gordon win three Winston Cup championships, think of fuel mileage races?
“Racing is racing,” he said. “Certain tracks have their own characteristics. California has those wide lanes that give drivers a lot of room so there aren’t many yellow flags. The longer you run those high speeds on green, the more the fuel becomes a concern.”
Fernandez, who oversees Dodge’s motor racing program, from Nextel Cup down to the grass roots in SCCA and the Dodge Weekly Racing Series, which runs at Irwindale Speedway, said the object at every level was to “win races and championships.”
“What we are trying to do, through racing, is create an image of Dodge through performance,” he said. “The DNA of Dodge is the core of our engineering and vehicle development. It is about reliability, durability and winning performances.
“They used to say, ‘Win on Sunday and sell on Monday,’ and I’m not sure if anyone really felt that way. I consider it more conceptual than real. I hope we don’t just sell on Monday, we want to sell every day.”
He said that Dodge was using the lower-level series to develop drivers.
“I wish we had started looking at young guys sooner,” he added. “In a couple of years, we’ll have some guys retiring. We need to look to our feeder system. That’s how we got Brendan Gaughan from our truck program. He’s going to be a good one. And it was great when Ray plucked Kasey away from Ford. We knew he was good, but he has surprised us. He has been even better than we ever anticipated.”
In Kahne’s first eight races, he had two poles and four top-five finishes.
“It might look like Gaughan is not quite up there with Kasey, but they are different situations,” Fernandez said. “Brendan’s on a different learning curve. We put Kahne with an established team, an established car and a great coach in Elliott. In Brendan’s case, it was almost an entirely new team that was formed when Penske and Jasper Racing teamed up to form a new organization with new cars and a new driver. We’re not worried about Gaughan.
“We also feel that guys coming up from sprint cars and midgets, the way Kasey did, the way Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman did, adapt better to driving with their cars loose than the guys from trucks or late models. It just takes them a little longer to mature.
“We have a good mix of youth and veterans, but we have to keep looking ahead. That means keeping our feeder system alive, searching for new talent.”
Kahne is 24, Newman and Mears 26, McMurray 27 and Gaughan 28. On the other side of the ledger, Elliott is 48, Wallace and Marlin 46, Petty 43 and Green 41.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Nextel Cup Standings
*--* Driver Points Starts Wins Top 5 Top 10 1 Dale Earnhardt Jr. 1,167 8 2 5 6 2 Kurt Busch 1,162 8 1 1 5 3 Matt Kenseth 1,155 8 2 3 6 4 Jimmie Johnson 1,088 8 1 4 5 5 Elliott Sadler 1,069 8 1 2 4
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* Today’s race: Aaron’s 499, 10 a.m., Channel 11, at Talladega (Ala.) Speedway.
* Next Sunday: California 500, noon, Channel 11, at California Speedway, Fontana.
