Time to leave NASCAR
It’s another embarrassing season for Dodge in NASCAR as the teams struggle to make top ten finishes and the PR people struggle to find good news in one bad race after another.
This is not the way it should be for Chrysler, which once dominated NASCAR. Of course, that was back in the days when they raced production cars. Heavily modified production cars, to be sure, with every team cheating as well as they could, but still, the company with the best production designs could win, and Plymouth and Dodge routinely did.
Then came the many rule changes designed to put Plymouth and Petty in their place.
Now, NASCAR costs many millions of dollars that are sorely needed elsewhere. Chrysler is in bankruptcy and there is no need to spend that money on a pointless attempt to garner publicity in racing’s version of professional wrestling. The contract can be broken without penalty, I suspect — and now is the time to do it. Let them get out while they still can.
Chrysler needs all its engineers and money for the production products, especially now that Fiat’s whole lineup is becoming available. I don’t think anyone believes Americans will buy rebadged Fiats without any modifications, and I doubt that simply shoving Pentastar V6 engines into Alfas will result in a car that’s appropriate for American conditions any more than dropping a Mercedes diesel into the Grand Cherokee resulted in the ideal SUV.
Bringing unmodified imports into the US usually fails; that’s why the Camry and Avalon are largely engineered in the United States now, and why the Corolla is worked over by American engineers and sold here in a different configuration than in Japan or Europe. That’s why the Omni and Horizon were the first successful SIMCAs on these shores. The more engineers and money that is put into modifying those Fiats for American sale, the better off Chrysler and its customers will be. The last thing we need is for Chrysler to be wasting its money and engineers’ time on setting up cars you can’t buy to go around in circles in a game that’s run by a family with an anti-Chrysler grudge almost as big as the one at that un-named “consumer magazine.”
So come on, guys. Start off on the right foot. Put the money where it’s needed. If you want to market, use Google to direct people to your fine web sites (or to ours). It’s cheaper, more direct, and probably more effective.