Earnhardt concedes Chase spot; no foreign brands soon
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- With his Nationwide Series driver, Brad Keselowski, saying he wants to be in the Sprint Cup Series next season, JR Motorsports owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Friday he still loves the Nationwide Series but he's open to all options.
Earnhardt was the 1998 and '99 champion of what was then known as the Busch Series, driving for his family's Dale Earnhardt Inc. team. After partnering his team with Rick Hendrick this season, he's been considering moving his operation to Cup in 2010.
"Going into the Cup Series is going to be quite a challenge for anybody to find the kind of financial support that you need," Earnhardt said. "The Nationwide Series is still as exciting to me as it was when we first got into it. Although the parity and the makeup of the series changes it seems year to year, it's still an interesting series with a lot of great personalities and it's still fun for me. We've been able to bring Brad in and progress him through the series and he's got a great opportunity to move on and he'll hopefully be a fixture in this sport, as a whole, over the next several years -- and that's really what we wanted to achieve. Hopefully, we'll have that opportunity again with someone else once Brad has completed his cycle, if you will.
"I enjoy that. I enjoy kind of bringing people in and having a part in getting them there. So that's what's exiting about the series for me as an owner. It's easier to secure financial support for that series when you're talking about the entire sum of money that it takes to compete. It's a little bit of a challenge to convince corporate America why that series versus any other series. But nothing comes easy."
And that's certainly the case as NASCAR continues to consider bringing a version of the new Sprint Cup chassis to the Nationwide Series in some form, perhaps as early as next season.
"I don't know what the Nationwide cars will look like next year," Earnhardt said. "I haven't had any conversations with anyone in the sport about the car. I haven't had any diagrams or ideas or drafts in front of me to look at. So I'm just waiting in the wings like everybody else, I assume.
"I'm sure that we as a company sort of didn't turn our nose up at it but we really didn't involve ourselves any in the equation of developing the car. We have our budget worked out to where we can run this year with what we have but we don't have the money to develop this car. You'd be lucky to be able to do it just under $150,000 in just an early or pre-season development. So before you even run a race, you've spent a couple hundred thousand dollars and we do not have that as a company. So we can't involve ourselves in the development of it so we are sort of like everyone else, waiting on whoever that team is -- whether it will be RCR or Roush or whoever that is that will be a part of developing that car with NASCAR and building this car and seeing what kind of car they produce. Without a doubt I'm sure it'll be a safer race car [but] the car we have now in the Nationwide Series, in my opinion, is the ultimate race car."
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