NASCAR HATES FORD? FOMOCO’S DISMAL TELEVISION SEASON

The 2007 racing season has given fans who follow via television Ford Motor Company’s (F) 105-year racing tradition very few occasions to celebrate.

While FoMoCo is having an exemplary season in the World Rally Championship, the WRC has vanished from U.S. television in a haze of NASCAR tire smoke. (NASCAR is the "800,000-pound gorilla" of American motorsports television, guzzling television time faster than hogs rooting at an "All-U-Can-Eat" smorgasbord).

Ford’s Mustangs are also obtaining good results in the rarely-televised Koni Challenge Series. (One irony is that the Koni Challenge series cars are production-based, unlike the grotesque, tube-framed "funny cars" required by the National Association for STOCK CAR Auto Racing)

In the Koni Challenge’s senior sibling -- the Grand-Am series (a France Family sports car series that receives fractions of TV air time between NASCAR shows) -- FoMoCo’s tiny presence is seldom evident from the pictures. But FoMoCo has no presence within Grand-Am’s competitor: the more sophisticated and international American LeMans Series.

With Ford’s abandonment of the Champ Car World Series, its decade-long boycott of the Indy Racing League, and its continuing absence from Formula One, Ford has virtually disappeared from televised open wheel racing.

John Force Racing – FoMoCo’s only high profile factory-sponsored effort in all of big-time drag racing – has grimly faced on-track tragedy as well as sub-par elimination results.

Consequently, perceptions of Ford Motor Company’s motorsports efforts among U.S. television audiences turn on its NASCAR fortunes.

SO FAR, NOT SO GOOD.

To say that Ford’s 2007 NASCAR campaign is a disaster would be too kind.

Although FoMoCo has two teams on track for the made-for-TV, twelve-team "Chase to the Nextel (soon to be Sprint) Cup and a driver battling at the top of the undercard "Busch Series," Ford would be the NASCAR "in the cellar" if it weren’t for fledgling Toyota’s teething troubles.

Chevy is winning nearly all the Nextel Cup races and leading all the laps. Meanwhile, many Nextel Cup tracks are seeing more "race fans disguised as empty seats." But in the omnipotent mind of NASCAR, there's NO PROBLEM! Virtually the only way a Ford can get into the lead is if the Chevys pit.

The past weekend’s events in Canada and at Pocono dramatically demonstrated FoMoCo’s struggles. In the Canadian Busch race, Ford’s championship points contender dropped out, then Ford’s two lead cars (driven by Marcos Ambrose and Robby Gordon) took each other out, prompting NASCAR to cavalierly award the win to a Chevy driver (Kevin Harvick). Some charge that NASCAR ignored its own "no racing to the caution flag" rule by not resetting the field as it was before Ambrose’s retaliatory punt of Gordon, rewarding the thuggish Harvick – who earlier had caused even a bigger "beatin’ an’ bangin’" melee than the Ambrose-Gordon altercations-- with a "gift" win. Yet while NASCAR ignored Harvick’s rough driving and rewarded him with the win, it parked Robby Gordon.

Pocono was even worse for Ford fans, as former Ford driver (and championship winner) Kurt Busch stunk up the show in a Dodge "funnycar", followed by an endless parade of the usual suspect Chevy "funnys." Even the upbeat Team Ford Racing website struggled to put much of a positive spin on that result.

Maybe FoMoCo needs to recall its NASCARs . . . .

But the "problem" is really more NASCAR’s fault than Ford’s.

In earlier days, when "NASCARs" were more production based, the sanctioning body was often quick to step in with rules adjustments to even up the makes. In the so-called "modern era, except for perhaps 1985, when Bill Elliott dominated NASCAR’s superspeedway events (yet still lost the season championship to a "stroking" Chevy team), NASCAR has generally gone out of its way to pump up the fortunes of GM teams. And even then, NASCAR allowed GM in 1986 to race the hideous "cheater" Monte Carlo SS "Aerocoupe", the bizarre Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2 and a fleet of formerly front-wheel-drive Oldsmobiles and Buicks to counter the mass-production-based aerodynamic superiority of Elliott’s Thunderbird.

NASCAR history since 1971 is replete with examples of NASCAR tweaking the rules to make sure Chevy was competitive (or more than competitive) in "the show." But nothing in NASCAR history is remotely as disgusting as the freakish, aero-sensitive "common template" cars that are facilitating Chevys current dominance.

Chevy spinmeisters, gullible racing "journalists" and NASCAR’s P.R. operation claim that nowadays (in the non-stock "common template" age) "Everybody has the same stuff." This "common" gibberish blithely glosses over that "everybody" obviously does not have the same access to information, testing or simulation "now." Moreover, the Chevy teams now have a new, wholly non-production engine that NASCAR "gave" them. Ford’s teams are still struggling with an aging derivative of the Cleveland engine (that NASCAR allowed Dodge, Chevy and Toyota to copy and improve upon in clean-sheet designs). Only Ford now uses an engine design compatible any of its (former) production pieces.

Just as the fictional Harry Hogge said in the awful "Days of Thunder" movie – "they’re ain’t nothing ‘stock’ about a ‘stock car.’" But in NASCAR’s Ford-hating world, Chevys, Dodges and even Toyotas are allowed to be even less "stock" than Fords.

Chevrolet’s huge super-teams have also exploited a "high-tech, computer-driven, shop-based race simulators" loophole that caught Roush-Fenway and Ford’s smaller teams flat-footed in the boring, ugly, low-tech "Car-of-Tomorrow" roll-out. Yet NASCAR has taken no steps toward mandatory set-up and data sharing or allowing the teams without simulators to engage in more "real world" testing.

Obviously, if it were Ford leading all the laps and winning all the races, NASCAR would have acted by now (if only to protect its favored primadonna "stars," such as Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., (turncoat) Jeff Gordon, and Jimmy Johnson). "Equal" in NASCAR still means some are more "equal" than others."

Equally obvious is that NASCAR doesn’t "hate Ford" so much that it won’t take buckets of Ford’s money for the season-ending Ford Championship Weekend. But it apparently can’t see fit to provide Ford teams with an equal chance of enjoying the fruits of that weekend!

If NASCAR was still a production-based series (which sadly it’s not), Ford could simply design and sell more competitive cars for "stock car" racing. But with NASCAR micro-managing the key specifications of the "modern [sic] NASCAR," Ford’s responses are very limited. Thus, there is no rational reason for NASCAR to permit the sort of Chevy dominance that has occurred in 2007.

So does NASCAR hate Ford? It sure looks that way to some.