ROUSH FENWAY RACING: NO “BRAWN” OR “FORCE” (BUT AT LEAST IT’S NOT RICHARD PETTY MOTORSPORTS)

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Roush Fenway Racing (RFR) is limping into the made-for-television “Chase” to NASCAR's Sprint Cup. (Or at least 2/5ths of RFR is)

And the odds of a common-template “Ford Fusion” winning the 2009 Sprint Cup must be astronomical. While a paltry 1/6th of the “Chasers” will have “Ford” decals on their look-alike “NASCARs,” Roushkateers “Cousin” Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle both hobbled their RFR funnyCar-of-Tomorrow “Fords” into the tail end of the Chase with sagging momentum and slim win prospects.

(Ford plans to introduce its new “common-specification,” non-production NASCAR engine at the Chase race in Charlotte, but whether it will make any impact on the title hopes of the Biff or Cousin Carl is unknown.)

The real heartbreaker was the failure of the only Ford driver ever to make all of the prior “Chases” – 2009 Daytona 500 winner and 2003 Cup Champion Matt Kenseth – to make the cut. Kenseth floundered in the “regular season”-ending race at Richmond, while a pair of “Toyotas” provided the only drama for the twelfth-place Chase “bump-spot.”

Contrast RFR’s apparent lack of performance and “strategery” with some of September’s headliners in motorsports:

1. Ford’s favorite drag racing organization, John Force Racing, stepped up and not only put a phalanx of fuel funny cars into NHRA’s version of the “Chase,” the wily John Force knocked rival Cruz Pedregon out. Critics (mostly the Pedregons) claim that Force manipulated the results of his match-up with teammate Robert Hight at the U.S. Nationals to get Hight’s“fuel coupe” into the “Countdown.” The NHRA found no evidence. But even if Force did “dump” at the “Big Go”, he “dumped” with style, timing, and strategy.

(In thanks for all the controversy, the NHRA fined Force $10,000 (ostensibly for shoving an NHRA official who stepped into an argument between Force and one of the whining Pedragon brothers). Actually, the NHRA probably ought to be paying Force $100,000 for all of the free publicity that the NHRA has reaped from the brouhaha).

In contrast to the strategic success of John Force Racing, RFR had more than one-in-ten cars in the field at Richmond, but lacked the tactics or performance to get Matt Kenseth into the Chase.

2. The real masters of strategy in September have been the Brawn GP team in Formula One. Leading the Constructors and Drivers championships based on early season success, Brawn slumped during the summer months. Some wags questioned whether Jensen Button and Rubens Barrichello could put their Brawns into the winners circle after the “Big Teams” seemed to regain their form. The early dominance of Brawn looked like a distant anomaly.

Rubens Barrichello, who is the only driver remaining in the series to have matched up against Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost (and one who suffered through three frustrating, winless seasons in Jackie Stewart’s Fords), managed to overcome the Brawn slump with a surprising victory in the European Grand Prix. It was Barrichello’s first win in five seasons.

Still, many thought Barrichello’s win as a fluke and believed Brawn’s storybook season was still going to come crashing down.

Yet Brawn – down 80 brake horsepower to the better-funded KERS-equipped teams – used an impeccable one-stop strategy to take another one-two finish at the historic Grand Prix of Italy (only a day after Kenseth’s flop at Richmond).

Any doubts that the Brawn GP cars are among the best handling and easiest on the soft “option” tires were erased at Monza.

Again, brilliant driving and a well-executed strategy produced spectacular results.

Also it appears that the Mercedes 2.4-liter V8 is emerging as the engine to have in Formula One. That’s a bitter pill for those who remember the domination of the Cosworth Ford V8s before the 1980s Turbo Era. One wonders what if Ford would have taken better care of Cosworth’s customer engine business in the 1980s and 1990s . . . .

Back in the homogenized “common-template” spec-racer world of NASCAR . . . among the more interesting news to come out of the Richmond weekend was the announcement of a merger in 2010 between Ford-aligned Yates Racing and the Dodge-aligned Richard Petty Motorsports (formerly Gillett Evernham Motorsports).

Although many expected RPM to dump bankrupt Dodge for cash-flush Toyota, the new Petty-Yates superteam will be “Powered by Ford” in 2010. “Yates driver Paul Menard will join RPM's three-car team of Kasey Kahne, Elliott Sadler and AJ Allmendinger.”

This isn’t Richard Petty’s first flirtation with Fords. Petty wheeled a Ford Torino in the 1969 season. And the defunct Petty Engineering team ran a Ford Thunderbird after “The King” took his Pontiacs to Mike Curb’s team in the early 1980s.

Perhaps if Richard Petty had aligned with Ford back in the days when Iacocca’s Dodge Division was abandoning NASCAR (at the time of the first bailout in the 1970s) or even later when the Daimler-Benz owned “DaimlerChrysler” was cribbing from Ford’s NASCARs to return to “Cup,” this news would be a little more exciting. But after decades of weak performance, the name “Richard Petty” is arguably synonymous with both failure and everything that’s wrong with the modern, corporate marketing-driven, common-template mess that is today’s NASCAR.

At least the new RPM should help the Ford car count in 2010. Whether the new Ford-powered RPM will challenge Roush Fenway (or more importantly the Toyotas and the Hendrick Chevrolets) remains to be seen.

Perhaps the slogan for Ford Racing ought to be “there’s always next year . . . .”

ARE MASS MARKET “TOTAL ELECTRIC” CARS ALWAYS VAPORWARE?

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At the Wall Street Jounrnal’s March 2009 ECO:nomics conference, Ford Motor Company boss Alan Mulally proclaimed "In 10 years, 12 years, you are going to see a major portion of our portfolio move to electric vehicles."


Some automotive journalists are skeptical of this claim. Veteran auto journalist Jerry Flint, for one.

In an insightful piece at Forbes.com entitled “The Myth Of The Electric Car” Jerry Flint recounts earlier top-level prognostications about the Electr-o-matic Fords in your future.

In 1966, FoMoCo. “Whiz Kid” Arjay Miller announced “Ford would be fully producing an electric car in five to 10 years.”

When Flint cornered a FoMoCo executive on Miller’s claim years later, the Glass Houser replied "Jerry, you've misunderstood. That's a running target. It's always five to 10 years away."

Flint opines that “There still are three obvious problems with the dream of an electric car. Range. Recharging time. Battery cost.”

Flint is also skeptical about the cost and life-span of quick-charging batteries with sufficient amperage for an electric car.

As anyone knows who has ever seen engineering students hack together a Formula SAE-based “Formula Hybrid” racer or one of the “FutureTrucks” for the old Department of Energy-sponsored competition, there are no shortage of schemes for electrification.

The real problems are: (a) getting down the price point to mass market viability; and (b) making the technology daily-driver safe, transparent, and practical.

Currently, production of electrified vehicles is more about making an aspirational statement than generating a profit. The bean counters say that virtually none of the electrified vehicles on the market are profitable.

Obviously, dramatic increases in energy costs could affect operational viability. But as we’ve seen in recent years, such price spikes kill the economy and the overall demand for new vehicles.

Still some hybridization is inevitable as Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards are jacked up to 35 m.p.g. or beyond and if we’re to avoid a fleet of sluggish 1-1.5 liter "huggable, smiley" microcars. And hybridization is perhaps the only way to preserve traditional high-performance and sports cars in a world gone mad over the anthropogenic “climate change religion.”

So Flint is partially right.

He’s right that pure, interstate-cruising “Reddy Kilowatt” electromobiles are still impractical as mass market products . . . and despite all of the Teslas and Chang'an Ben Bens and GM EV-1s and the speculations of Neil Young, the five-to-ten year moving target will likely remain.

Certainly a small niche of “true believers” will be willing to put up with the “range, recharging time, and battery cost” of silent, undiluted “Willie Wiredhand” motoring.
But 99% of us won’t.

Barring some technological breakthrough or a further financial collapse, “mild” electrical assist of internal combustion powerplants – avoiding the limits of “range, recharging time, and battery cost” – is certainly something that will necessarily follow Mulally’s timetable.

Most certainly, if electric Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) are perfected in motorsports, such systems will likely trickle down to street vehicles. Hopefully, Ford Racing will be searching out opportunities for motorsports development of such systems and will influence sanctioning bodies to legalize KERS and "electric nitrous."

The open question is can Ford make enough money building doing that? Or is profitability another one of those five-to-ten year moving targets?