The DTM coming to the U.S. and other NASCAR topics of note.

After seeing the latest Australian V8 Supercar race on the Speed channel over the weekend it’s easy to see why U.S. road racing fans - longing for something, anything to give them hope of a super production-based racing series on the way that doesn’t have the initials “NASCAR” attached - would go “all in” for the “DTM coming to America” rumor that flared up over the last few days. Supposedly, with BMW’s entry back into the German Touring Car Championship in 2012, the Munich-based promoter of the DTM - ITR - is working on some sort of “internationalization” plan that would take the DTM to America, Asia and other parts of the world, and that their plan has some sort of affiliation or endorsement from NASCAR.

Let me make this as clear as I can be: There is no truth to the report that NASCAR is involved in this whatsoever, and if there is actually a plan to take DTM to America, it’s a trial balloon being floated by the head of ITR - none other than Hans Werner Aufrecht - who told Autosport magazine “In America, we are working with the NASCAR organization. Beginning in 2013, we hope to have a championship with 12 races in the United States. They will be six with Grand-Am and six with NASCAR events, for a stand alone championship in America. I believe this is very, very good for the future of motorsport in the United States.”

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A Vacuum of NASCAR's Own Creation

The winds of change blowing through Detroit’s high-performance and motorsports programs threaten to leave one dinosaur out in the cold.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.The announcement this week that Mark Reuss was re-directing and re-imagining GM’s future high-performance mission - and the motorsports efforts associated with it - should come as no surprise to anyone who has been regularly reading this column. Reuss’s background - before becoming GM’s energized North American leader - was engineering, specifically high-performance engineering, and his roots in the performance arena go way back to his youth. And let’s not forget that Mark’s gig before coming back to the U.S. a year ago was running GM’s Holden operation in Australia - a hotbed of performance and rear-wheel-drive chassis development within the corporation - and also an avid corporate supporter of the V8 Supercars.

Upon his return, Reuss’s early assessment of GM Racing’s direction was that it was in need of an overhaul, in philosophy and execution. Yes, the Corvette Racing program was eminently successful, and what was being developed on the race track was finding its way directly into the production Corvette that consumers could buy, so that clearly wasn’t the problem. As a matter of fact, the Corvette Racing program is a testament as to how a manufacturer should go about running a proper racing enterprise, with a direct technological conduit to the production car program resulting in a better street car by every conceivable measure, including performance, overall efficiency and owner satisfaction.

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Setting the table for a new, more relevant NASCAR.

Photo by Rick DoleEditor’s Note: In Part Three of an exclusive three-part series (please see Sources at the bottom of this article of follow Business as Usual No Longer Applies and Charting A New Course.), Peter outlines the most substantive and wide-ranging package of changes coming to NASCAR in years. Due to the news breaking nature of this column we’d like to give you a reminder that the entire contents of this website are ©2010 Autoextremist.com, Inc. We are more than happy to give permission to other media outlets for quotes and use of this content as long as proper attribution is given.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.After a highly-confidential meeting that took place over the weekend before the Daytona 24 Hour race - and in subsequent meetings that will be played out in the early spring - it’s clear that we are on the precipice of a dramatically different direction for NASCAR, one that not only marks a new era of NASCAR involvement and cooperation with the manufacturers, but a new willingness on NASCAR’s part to move the needle in a positive direction, embrace change, and make genuine, substantive progress when it comes to creating more relevance between what the car companies are selling, and what NASCAR is racing.

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Charting a new course

A couple of weeks ago I warned that one of the domestic manufacturers has had it up “to here” with what NASCAR has become and is on the verge of laying out for the powers that be in Daytona Beach just how far that displeasure has grown, to the point that business as usual - the obligatory NASCAR stance on just about everything - as well as NASCAR’s go-along-to-get-along culture, would no longer be acceptable as far as this company was concerned.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.On the eve of another 24 hours of Daytona, the winds of change are blowing into NASCAR-land via a series of meetings that will be taking place in Daytona Beach over the next few days - one will even take place before the start of the race on Saturday - and weeks to come. The subject? Making NASCAR relevant enough in order for two of the three Detroit manufacturers to consider continuing on with the “racertainment” series beyond the existing contracts.

Relevant. There’s that word again, but what does it really mean? In this case it means the following crucial things to these manufacturers:

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The U.S. will have to wait for next American F1 Champion

Photo courtesy of LAT USAWith Joe Gibbs Racing’s signing of Kyle Busch to a long-term contract that will keep him in NASCAR for the foreseeable future, any notion of the possibility of the younger Busch becoming the next great hope for America in Formula 1 went right out the window. And before you fire-up your flame throwers, I’m well aware of the myriad programs churning right now to get young American hot shoes pointed in the direction of an F1 career, and I applaud them mightily. But the Kyle Busch situation is different in that I am firmly convinced that with a precisely executed indoctrination period and seated with a proper, competitive team, Busch could have contended for a F1 championship right now.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.And no, I’m not interested in generating an instant referendum on Kyle Busch’s behavior over the last couple of seasons either. No matter what side of the Kyle Busch fence you come down on - as in love him or hate him - there’s no denying the young driver’s meteoric talent. In fact I believe Kyle’s pure natural ability behind the wheel is the kind that only comes along once in a generation, meaning he can easily run at the front of the field in any racing series he chooses to compete in. And there’s no doubt that the fledgling USF1 effort had its eyes on the young superstar as part of creating an all-American driving effort in the global racing series.

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"Business as usual" will no longer apply...

When it comes to one manufacturer’s relationship with NASCAR.
We’ve been down this road before. I reported several years ago (beginning in 2006) that the “automatic” funding for NASCAR racing and promotional programs by the Detroit manufacturers was coming under severe scrutiny - which they were - and that one could easily envision a scenario where one or more of the Detroit automakers would eventually be forced to pull out. And that was even long before the financial roof caved in on Detroit in 2009 forcing two of what was left of the Not So Big Three to declare bankruptcy.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.Then I reported that at the 2008 Brickyard 400 weekend the powers that be at NASCAR were given a clear warning by representatives of the domestic manufacturers that the gravy train was not only heading to its last roundup, but that the whole damn thing could jump the tracks at any moment and they needed some relief, and in a hurry too. NASCAR, of course, reacted predictably by mumbling a few platitudes in person and then following up with some back-patting sessions later, carefully avoiding the manufacturers as a group (NASCAR minions know it’s better to divide the manufacturers in order to conquer them, after all). In other words, they did absolutely nothing.

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Greatness Personified

My feelings about the France family’s NASCAR “circus” are well known. I find the byzantine, “go along to get along” NASCAR “way” of conducting business as they stoke the fires of their marketing machine to be, for the most part, reprehensible. A closed-minded enterprise based on greed and fueled by the relentless desire to perpetuate the status quo, Brian France and his minions who run NASCAR provide a textbook example of how not to do it week-in and week-out as they trundle along with their “yester-tech” mindset and their ingrained philosophies fundamentally based on change as anathema.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.That otherwise well-intentioned and for the most part savvy marketers and manufacturers go along with the France-manufactured bullshit and hype is at times incomprehensible, and their feeble explanations as to why they’re involved border on being nothing more than excuses for the fact that they’re totally incapable of coming up with even a hint of a genuinely new marketing idea involving cars and racing. It’s good to finally see that at least some of these marketers are realizing that their messages are getting lost in the cacophony of messages that bury each and every TV broadcast and that their “return on investment” is as much fiction as anything quantifiable. Especially as they see in-person race attendance and TV viewing numbers plummet.

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