ORIGINAL: http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cf...NASSI-08-18-05
Ganassi can't explain Dodge's woes

By MIKE MULHERN
Winston-Salem Journal
18-AUG-05

When he arrived in the NASCAR garage, Chip Ganassi was a veteran Indy-car team owner and hot stuff. Then he nearly won the NASCAR championship with Sterling Marlin in 2002.

When Marlin's title bid blew up when he broke his neck in a September crash, Ganassi looked like a miracle worker when he plugged in unheralded Jamie McMurray, who won two weeks later at Charlotte in only his second time out on a NASCAR track.

It was, all in all, a very auspicious beginning for a man who has won five Indy-car championships.

Since then ... well, it has been a rocky ride. Ganassi hasn't had a Nextel Cup win since McMurray's surprise, and now rival owner Jack Roush wants to hire Ganassi's lead driver.

"Everybody is looking for the one thing that is wrong," Ganassi said. "There is one thing that is obviously wrong, only one thing only.

"But, of course, there's not just one thing when you're doing bad. Like when you're doing good it's not just one thing, it's a lot of things.

"Our biggest challenge is, when Dodge first came in, it had an aerodynamic advantage the first couple of years. And the other manufacturers knew that and lobbied against it, and NASCAR evened all that out with the templates.

"And the tires are different now, too.

"You can't just say, 'Let's go back to the 2002 setups when we were doing so good.' Things have changed so much since then it's not even funny. So the only thing we're scared to try is jumping off a bridge. Everything else we're up for."

But Dodge "won" the last NASCAR wind-tunnel test, and Dodge also "won" NASCAR's most recent engine-dyno test, so Ganassi certainly can't point a finger at ace engine man Ernie Elliott.

With ostensibly the best body and the strongest engines, shouldn't Dodge be winning more races? Yet, Chevrolet is atop the NASCAR leaderboard with 12 wins, followed by Ford with nine. Dodge has one, Kasey Kahne's at Richmond.

"We're at the wrong races. We've got to go to those dyno races and wind-tunnel races," Ganassi said with a laugh. "Just think how many fans will show up for those. We're hanging out at the wrong places."

Patience, Ganassi said, patience.

Actually, there may be another dynamic at play here _ Toyota and politics.

The fact that Ganassi and Roger Penske are both Toyota men on the Indy-car side may have Dodge officials reluctant to deal them all their tricks.

There are hints by some Dodge men that DaimlerChrysler executives consider Ganassi and Penske as the potential leaders of any Toyota move into Nextel Cup and that may have separated the NASCAR Dodge teams into two camps, with Ray Evernham's operation on one side and Penske and Ganassi on the other. Dodge pulled Bill Davis' contract because of worries about Davis' Toyota truck deal.

But Toyota's future in NASCAR has become a major mystery over the past two months. NASCAR wants Toyota to move up to Cup racing and the presumed timeline has been for a debut at the 2007 Daytona 500, with a Busch debut next season. NASCAR executives are reported to have put specific timelines in their contracts with Toyota.

But Toyota and NASCAR now appear to be at loggerheads over engine designs, and Toyota sources are pushing the position that they have no plans to move out of the truck series soon.

Whether that's a bargaining ploy remains to be seen. NASCAR has extended until Sept. 1 its deadline for Toyota to make a decision on the Busch tour.

On the track and in the Ganassi garage, the questions are more immediate. Is it technology, is it engineering work, is it pit work, is it race strategy, is it NASCAR's new "impound-after-qualifying" rules, or is it the drivers?

McMurray, for all his talent, hasn't put the numbers on the board, although he was a close second at Daytona last month and won the pole at Pocono. Most amazing is that McMurray has led only one lap all season, and that was under caution at Michigan International Speedway in June.

Jason Leffler and Jimmy Spencer came and went, and Marlin has been in a slump since his last tour win at Darlington in the spring of '02.

And Casey Mears, well, he's still "promising." And qualifying seems to be an issue: although on the front row at Michigan in June, he's averaging just a 24th on the starting grid for the year, and a finishing average not much stronger. He has led only 33 laps.

Marlin's stats are even worse. This year has been fitful for him, with good runs at Daytona in February and Texas in April, and then a considerable void until a ninth at Indianapolis last week. During that drought he racked up four DNFs.

Marlin, who has won four times with Ganassi since joining in 2000, has led 12 laps.

So Ganassi has decided to make changes.

First he will have rookie David Stremme in Marlin's car next season, and Marlin's fate is still up in the air. Ganassi wants to keep him on as a corporate spokesman, but Marlin, who just turned 48, doesn't look like a man ready to hang up his helmet.

Reed Sorenson, though only 19, will be Ganassi's new fourth driver. But with a limited resume, is Sorenson too young for Nextel Cup? In 2004, he ran three ARCA and four Busch races; this year he has two Busch wins, two poles, 10 top fives and 14 top 10s and leads the rookie-of-the-year competition.

"I don't think he's too young," Ganassi said. "On the other hand, I don't think he's got the maturity of Rusty Wallace, either."

The hot story surrounding Ganassi is Roush's move on McMurray.

But even a month after Roush's move, Ganassi still isn't saying much. For one, because Ganassi pulled Jason Leffler away from Joe Gibbs a few years ago, and Ganassi was also in the middle of a battle for rights to Tony Stewart.

"I don't think I could call that an underhanded move," Ganassi said, "because I did that with Leffler."

But Ganassi said he was just a pawn in Stewart's negotiating games: "That was a different thing _ I was just being a lily pad there."

So, talk about McMurray.

"Isn't this old news?" Ganassi asked. "There's just not that much to talk about. There are more drivers who will be leaving their teams. Does that mean everybody changes their marketing plans?"

Ganassi said it will be business as usual in 2006 as far as he and McMurray are concerned.


E-mail Mike Mulhern at mmulhern(at)wsjournal.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)

ORINAL: http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/news?...=tsn&type=lgns

Dodge, which has only two victories with the new Charger, has petitioned for a new nose in 2006. Evernham Motorsports, Chip Ganassi Racing and Penske Racing collaborated on the new piece, which resembles the Ford front end but has the old Intrepid center. The nose will be ready this week. It must be submitted by September 1 to be approved for next season by NASCAR. ...