Brand names: Important, or not?

By DAVID GREEN

News of General Motors' termination of support of second-echelon NASCAR racing Friday has elicited some discussion, much of it speculating about the status of factory-backed Chevy teams in the elite Sprint Cup Series.

Friday's news was hardly surprising, except perhaps in that the cutback was limited to Nationwide and Camping World series teams. Chevy was the last of America's Big Three companies to pull the plug on the two lower series, following fiscally faltering Chrysler and the healthiest of the U.S. companies, Ford.

I found an interesting contrast in some of the coverage of this story and reader responses to it. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart were singled out for expressing their loyalty to Chevrolet, Earnhardt for his insistence on a Chevy ride when he became a NASCAR free agent and Stewart for returning to the GM fold when he left Joe Gibbs Racing after one season in a Toyota.

Both drivers offered thoughtful comments about the state of the economy in general and the financial straits of American auto manufacturers in particular, and Stewart was particularly eloquent in noting the impact of the recession on so many Americans who have lost their jobs.

In stark contrast were the remarks of some readers who dismissed the notion of brand names being significant in today's NASCAR racing, most of them packaged in criticism of the new-generation racing stock car.

So -- do brand names matter, or not?

GM and Chrysler did not go broke because they wasted large sums of money using auto racing as a marketing tool. Some people -- ordinary people, not just guys like Earnhardt and Stewart -- do still have brand preference and they don't care that Jeff Gordon's Monte Carlo never saw an assembly line. The minimum number of pieces of hardware that are Genuine Chevrolet parts are irrelevant. It has a bowtie on it, and that's good enough.

Ditto for many NASCAR fans who drive Ford Explorers or Dodge Ram pickups or Chrysler minivans. They buy into the notion that the car company is interested in the sport they love to watch, if in no other way than helping race teams compete, and that resonates with them.

My suspicion is that there are more of those fans in the upper ranges of the demographic chart measuring age. Younger people with strong brand preference likely grew up in staunch Ford, Chevy or Mopar homes and picked up on the fervor.

I think that's less important to drivers of Toyota Camrys. Toyota got into NASCAR in hopes of changing its image in order to appeal to younger NASCAR fans, or hopefully luring away some of those second- or third-generation fans from brand-oriented families.

The sport and the production automobile have evolved in different directions. I'm very much into nostalgia -- that's why I participate in vintage stock car racing -- and if there were an abundance of 1964-69 vintage Ford Galaxies, Fairlanes and Torinos, Dodge Coronets and Chargers, Plymouth Belvederes and Super Birds, Chevrolet Impalas and Chevelles, I'd be all for replacing the Car of Today with them.

Of course, I'd also be in favor of being 20 or 25 years old again, as long as I could keep all the life lessons I've learned since I was young and dumb. (Yes, I know -- "young and dumb" is a redundancy. My apologies to all you experience-challenged flatbellies out there.)

It's not gonna happen, neither the reappearance of those golden-era racecars nor the loss of my arthritis and about 60 pounds.

So that leaves us with the COT, the fragile state of the traditional U.S. auto industry and modern NASCAR racing. My assessment is that brand names still matter, and are pretty important to some of us, and matter not at all to others.