Deal Or No Deal?

Earlier today, about nine hours before Richard Petty and Gillett Evernham Motorsports announced they had agreed to join forces, I talked with a buddy of mine at what I would call a B-level squad — not a championship team, but a solid, competitive team capable of running in the top 20 consistently and the top five or 10 occasionally.

I asked him if his team had settled on drivers, sponsors or even the number of cars it would run in 2009. The answer was no. “We’re trying to get everything nailed down,” he told me. “Until then, we want to fly under the radar. We aren’t doing any interviews or talking to anyone.” The same could easily be said about half a dozen other Cup teams, including some decent ones.

The bottom line here? Practice for the Bud Shootout at Daytona begins four weeks from Friday and there are an awful lot of teams with big sponsor/driver/crew chief holes to fill. Those teams include the Petty-GEM union, Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, Yates Racing, Hall of Fame Racing, Triad Racing Technologies, Tommy Baldwin Racing and others.

Never has a NASCAR season begun with such uncertainty, almost all of which is due to the perfect storm of the insanely escalating costs of running a Sprint Cup team and the near collapse of the U.S. economy.

The hard times have made for some strange bedfellows in NASCAR, and I will be very, very interested to see how some of these shotgun marriages work out. I honestly can’t imagine Teresa Earnhardt and Chip Ganassi, for example, staying together for as much time as, say, Brittney Spears and K-Fed, but these are desperate times and desperate times require desperate measures. Maybe they can make it work.

The good news is, it appears Richard Petty is hanging around for a while longer. But the devil is in the details and with all the craziness in the sport right now, we well might not know all the details until Daytona. Or longer. So until then, I’ll let you know what I know when I know it. But take everything with a grain of salt today because a lot will change in the days and weeks ahead.