On Tuesday it was announced that Paul Menard would leave DEI, the organization for which he’s made all but one of his 68 career Cup starts and about 90 percent of his total starts since graduating to NASCAR’s national tours in 2003, to facilitate a third team in 2009 at Yates Racing.
For Yates, whose co-owner and general manager, Max Jones, said at Kansas Speedway that his organization was already prepared to run its No. 28 and 38 Ford Fusions next season for drivers Travis Kvapil and David Gilliland, it marks the next step in a systematic process.
But as secure as Jones says Yates has become, DEI is currently faced with one of the most confounding and downright alarming facts of Sprint Cup racing late in the 2008 year.
Seven races from the end of the season, and with four race teams solidly entrenched in NASCAR’s “magical” top 35 in the owner standings, the organization is looking at beginning the 2009 season in five months with only one of its four teams sponsored.
“The goal still is to run four teams out of this facility in 2009, and we do have assets that very few race teams in our sport have, which is four cars in the top 30,” DEI’s vice president of motorsports, John Story, said. “Those are tremendous assets to have on our side, and there’s a tremendous amount of value to be placed on that.
“And the reason that we have four cars in the top 30 is that we have four really strong race teams. And our program is far better than a lot of people, quite frankly, are willing to give us credit for, and [the achievements] are due in large part to the people we have here.
“I don’t want to get into the speculation thing because it’s going to do absolutely no good,” Max Siegel, DEI’s president of global operations, said after the announcement that Paul Menard and sponsor Menards are moving to Yates Racing next year.
“I can’t predict the future and it’s not going to do any good for our employees to put it out there.”
It continued this summer when Mark Martin announced he will leave the No. 8 U.S. Army car for HMS in 2009. Soon, according to sources, there will be the announcement that Army is leaving for Ryan Newman at Stewart-Haas Racing.
Regan Smith hasn’t had a full-time sponsor in the No. 01 all season and there hasn’t been an announcement of a deal for next year.
“What can I say?” Siegel said. “You lose a sponsor and it has an impact on your bottom line. … I’m not trying to turn it into an economic discussion, but the economy is bad and we’ve got families that work hard every week.”
Siegel said DEI will continue to run four cars the remainder of this season and will do everything possible to maintain that in ‘09. He said all options are being kept open, including merger with another organization.
“I don’t know if you rebound overnight by losing the sport’s most popular driver and everything the company went through with that,” he said. “We’re not even a year removed from that.
“From the public perception standpoint people like to pile on us, [saying] ‘This is the demise of DEI.’ We’re between a rock and a hard place to be quite honest.”
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