Bob Pockrass: Yates Racing-Hall of Fame Racing alliance makes most sense
COMMENTARY
Of all the NASCAR Sprint Cup mergers and alliances that have been formed over the last few months, the Yates Racing-Hall of Fame Racing alliance could be the most successful in 2009.
The planned Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team has the possibility of really improving both the performance of the cars as does the planned Richard Petty Motorsports team that is combining Petty Enterprises and Gillett Evernham Motorsports.
The reason that the Yates-Hall of Fame alliance can produce quickly, though, is because it has sponsorship and it has a driver who has won the Cup title. And Yates, which will operate the car for Hall of Fame, is the only team among any of them that exceeded expectations last year.
Without full sponsorship, Yates put two cars in the top 30. Granted, neither of them was in the top 20, but for a virtually new team with no veteran drivers, that had to be considered a great season.
Now it’s the second year of the Yates program, and they have a driver who knows how to get it done. Pairing Bobby Labonte with crew chief Todd Parrott gives Yates, through the alliance, a veteran duo working together. The gains they should be able to make on NASCAR’s new car because of their experience should be significant. Paul Menard is a driver who was respectable while at DEI and should not see any decline by moving to Yates.
While Yates was improving throughout 2008, the same couldn’t be said for the other organizations.
Labonte was impressive at the start of last season for Petty Enterprises, but then the team was in a transition with its purchase by Boston Ventures and the organization seemed to lose a little luster.
Inconsistency plagued Gillett Evernham Motorsports throughout last year. The new Petty team hopes that the addition of AJ Allmendinger helps because he and Kasey Kahne like a similar feel to the car. And they hope that Reed Sorenson reaches his potential.
But whether that translates into Kahne improving enough to make the Chase For The Sprint Cup remains to be seen. The two organizations already had worked together some, and whether the new organization will be significantly improved is questionable.
The combination of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Chip Ganassi Racing pairs two talented drivers in Martin Truex Jr. and Juan Pablo Montoya as well as two knowledgeable crew chiefs in Kevin Manion and Brian Pattie. This merger seems to have the most potential, as both drivers have won races in the last couple of years. DEI was pretty good on the track, but it was never clear who was the captain of the ship. Ganassi struggled on the track, but it was pretty clear that the team had direction, even if it was not executing well.
What makes the DEI-Ganassi and Petty-GEM deals shaky is that the teams have not yet announced sponsorship for the cars they plan to run.
Is Earnhardt Ganassi going to be a two-car team or three-car team? Is Petty going to be a two-car team or a three-car team or a four-car team? Without announced sponsorship, no one can be confident that all those cars are going to run the entire year.
Yates Racing, though, has said on the record that its No. 28 car won’t run the full season if it can’t get sponsorship. The team hopes to run it, but it won’t do so at the expense of the other two fully sponsored cars.
That’s why Labonte’s arrival with Hall of Fame, operated by Yates, seems to be the safest guess as the one that will produce results. It might not have the potential to win as many races or produce as many Chase contenders as the other mergers and alliances. But Labonte’s situation also is the one that has the least potential to struggle throughout 2009.
