Roush Fenway Racing leaving NASCAR Truck series in 2010
CONCORD, N.C. – The team with the most victories in what is now known as the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series won’t be around for the 2010 season.
Roush Fenway Racing co-owner Jack Roush said Tuesday his team, which has 50 victories in the series, will not return next year.
“I don’t see a presence in the Truck series for Roush Fenway for 2010,” Roush said.
The organization’s lone Truck team will follow driver Colin Braun to the Nationwide Series next year, and Roush won’t replace it.
The team has entered 707 races since the Truck series’ inception in 1995 and helped launch the NASCAR careers of Sprint Cup drivers Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle and Carl Edwards.
The team then known as Roush Racing won the 2000 series championship with Biffle driving.
“It’s been a happy time in the Truck series. It’s a worthwhile series. When Chrysler came in in the ‘90s and Toyota came in just after the turn of the century and brought their sponsorships, it discounted the sponsorships that other non-automotive affiliations would make,” Roush said.
“Dodge stepped into one of my sponsorship arrangements. When they came in and offered two trucks that [were] half the price for what was required to run one of my trucks, they basically discounted 75 percent.”
The cost of finding adequate sponsors has simply gotten too high, Roush said.
“All that was created by NASCAR’s insistence that before these manufacturers came in and went into the Cup side that they had to spend so much time on the Truck side,” Roush said. “Since they didn’t have sponsors, they had to pay for it themselves. That left the rest of us with a bill for paying the difference between what a sponsor would no pay and what the costs were that were just too big.”
