Gambling - Part 1 - Racing

Racing is controlled chaos; Detroit automakers are mature organizations that banished anarchy decades ago.

They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.

They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.

GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.

Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.

But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.

Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.

Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.

In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.

Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.

When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.

After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.

Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.

Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.

New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.

The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.

When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.

When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.

The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.

Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.