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Published: September 8, 2008
Proposed merger may be in jeopardy
■ Robby Gordon said he still wants to merge with Gillett-Evernham Motorsports, despite a suit just filed against him by Gillett-Evernham.
Gordon, who has been using engines supplied by Gillett-Evernham this season, said he expects to have a legal response in the next few days to the lawsuit filed against him by the Ray Evernham-George Gillett operation that claims a breach of contract on a proposed sale of Gordon's NASCAR operation to Evernham-Gillett.
But already there are rumblings in the NASCAR garage over what might be the real story behind the suit: whether Evernham and Gillett don't really want to do that deal with Gordon any more, perhaps because they have a better proposal, or for some other reason.
One key part of the entire situation is Gillett's plan to move his team from its relatively isolated Statesville airport location down much closer to the Charlotte-Concord heart of the sport.
Evernham and Gillett haven't been here to explain the situation from their viewpoint, but Gordon said he still wants to do the deal with them. One key to the proposed $20 million deal apparently is a sale of Gordon's shop and real estate -- some prime racing real estate -- to Evernham and Gillett.
There is increasing speculation that Chip Ganassi -- a Dodge team owner like Evernham, Gillett and Gordon -- might also be a potential merger partner with Evernham and Gillett. And Ganassi has prime real estate too, right next to the Concord airport.
"Unfortunately I guess you'll have to learn more about all that in our answers to their complaint," Gordon said. "But we have a deal with them, we have a contract that is still in effect.
"What they have asked -- I wouldn't say it's so much against Robby Gordon, but they have asked for release from the contract. But we've already done so many things together that I don't know if that's possible."
Might Evernham and Gillett want to drop the Gordon deal so they can do a deal with someone else? "Maybe that's what the case is, but I'm not privy to that information, so I don't know," Gordon said.
■ Jay Frye, whose work this season as general manager for Team Red Bull has helped spark a turnaround, is just back from a trip to Salzburg, Austria, the home of Red Bull, and he said he laid out for owner Dietrich Mateschitz the various team options for 2009 -- including possible expansion to a three-car team, or what Frye called "a 21/2-car team," with a new Scott Speed team running a partial Cup schedule. But Frye also pointed out that AJ Allmendinger's contract is up at the end of this year, and Frye said that Mateschitz has not been particularly enthusiastic about funding a full three-car operation.
"We should know more in the next week," Frye said.
Frye was noncommittal about reports that he could move from the Toyota operation to Rick Hendrick's Chevrolet family to work with the new Tony Stewart-Ryan Newman team. While some here insist a Frye-to-Hendrick move is a "done deal," others close to Frye insist he is leaning toward staying with Red Bull.
■ Kyle Petty is taking some hard shots at NASCAR's inability to hold Cup team owners in check and to keep the sport's biggest owners from getting even bigger.
On his weekly TV show Petty pointed to the close ties between four-team owner Rick Hendrick and Tony Stewart's new two-car team, terming that essentially a six-car operation. Petty drew praise from fellow small-team owners for his blunt assessment about NASCAR's failure to keep the playing ground level.
Petty termed the new Stewart team as "Hendrick South."
"And I said that's no different than Jack Roush and Doug Yates," Petty said, referring to those Ford team owners who have partnered in what clearly looks like a six-car operation.
Petty also pointed to the new closer business ties between Chevy owners Richard Childress and Teresa Earnhardt's DEI as another example.
Petty -- with a two-team operation -- said: "They just went from super-teams to mega-teams.
"The thing that NASCAR tried to eliminate they couldn't, because everyone is getting around the rules. And if you think any different, you're wrong."
However, Roush said that the trend toward such expansion was started by Hendrick, when Hendrick helped launch Joe Gibbs several years ago.
And Roush said that bigger is simply better because of "economics of scale.
"There are forces in the marketplace that encourage economics of scale … but NASCAR has made it clear that no owner can own more than four teams," Roush said.
"But there has been the precedent of teams building cars for other teams; Hendrick started it years ago.
"And as owners want to retire from this sport, it's not straightforward how you get out of this business -- it's like the mafia in a way, the only way you can get out is in a pine box. So for us to have affiliations that allow us to have economics of scale, once Hendrick started it, he put the rest of us in a reactionary mode."
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