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 . . . .”