Hard times ahead?

By DAVID GREEN

General Motors' decision, announced this week, to end its sponsorship of races at New Hampshire and Bristol is in all likelihood just the beginning of some belt-tightening overall and in the auto industry in particular.

The move, along with other actions announced by GM on Tuesday, cannot help but make race fans a little wary.

GM North America president Tony Clarke advised "there will be modifications and changes in our promotional footprint" and told reporters, "We're not going to talk about the details today, and specifically NASCAR, but all those areas have been reviewed and will continue to be as we work these action plans through."

Economic trends move in cycles, and the cyclical movement is affected by factors such as the spike in oil prices. Manufacturer participation in auto racing is also cyclical. The presence of automakers in all forms of racing has never been a constant.

When the first oil crisis struck in the early 1970s, Ford and Chrysler were already out of NASCAR racing. The sport managed to survive the abandonment of the factories and persevered along with the rest of us through the earlier-edition energy dilemma.

When the American car companies got back on their feet, they made their way back into racing. It was a gradual involvement, not a big-splash type of promotion, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ford, guided by Michael Kranefuss, and GM, under the leadership of Herb Fischel, established large-scale efforts in motor sports, with a particular emphasis on NASCAR. Those programs were the prototypes for today's efforts, including those by Dodge and Toyota.

Their money paid for technical development and promotion, both invaluable assets as NASCAR soared in popularity.

A generation earlier, the factories were heavily involved in racing to promote their powerful creations as Americans showed their fondness for horsepower as well as the over-the-top styling of the late 1950s. Factory participation abruptly ended when, in June 1957, the Automobile Manufacturers Association declared a moratorium on involvement in racing.

The reason was safety, not energy costs. Traffic fatalities were drawing the attention that gasoline prices are attracting today, and suddenly horsepower and speed were dangerous, not glamorous.

The factories -- especially GM -- continued to participate in various forms of racing, but not in an "official" capacity, until in 1962, Ford and Chrysler jumped back into NASCAR for another decade or so of support and promotion.

The down side of that period was that the relatively small number of factory-backed teams enjoyed a huge competitive advantage. The up side was that their lavish budgets made lots of perfectly usable hand-me-down parts available to the independents. It may have been impossible to compete for victories, but it was relatively easy to participate.

That model has radically changed. "Independent" is an anachronism in present-day NASCAR racing. Some fully-funded teams fail to make the 43-car cut these days, and more would if not for the protected top 35 car owners. Nowadays, all the teams are at least as much dependent on corporate sponsorship in general as they are in auto manufacturer support.

It may not be the monster that it became in the post-World War II era, but the car business is still an important vital statistic in America's economic health. Recent examinations tell us that the patient is not all that healthy.

That is bound to have an effect on NASCAR racing.

Just how much of an effect remains to be seen, but there's not much point in panicking. Best-case scenario: Racing will go on. Worst-case scenario: Racing as we know it will become a casualty of economic war. There isn't very much any of us as individuals can do about it.