American manufacturer Dodge have announced that they are to pull the plug on their NASCAR programme at the end of this season. The news comes as The Penske team have moved to Ford for the 2013 season. The withdrawl of Dodge means that there will be three manufacturer's competing in the 2013 Sprint Cup series. Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet have all begun testing their cars for next year.
It had been thought that IndyCar team owner Michael Andretti was interested in starting a NASCAR team with the help of Dodge, however that is not the case. I believe that it's a great decision that Michael Andretti has decided not to run a NASCAR team because his IndyCar team are doing extremely well this season and I think that had he set up a nascar team it would have taken a while for the team to be competitive and I fully believe that the IndyCar team may have suffered as a result.
Having said that, Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi have had great success in both IndyCar and NASCAR so there was no reason why Andretti wouldn't have been a success too however according to a report I read recently it was going to cost an estimated $5 million to set up the team.
In my opinion with the current economic climate it would have been difficult to put sponsorship together to run a team unless he managed to get a top driver to the team, as I mentioned in a previous post about Danica Patrick, thinking about it now it would have been extremely unlikely that Danica would have raced for Andretti in NASCAR.
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