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Bob PockrassNASCAR
Stewart-Haas Racing won a NASCAR Cup Series title in 2014 using chassis it bought and engines it leased from Hendrick Motorsports. The alliance ended following the 2016 season, but for all practical purposes, it was over well before then.
Furniture Row Racing won a Cup title in 2017 thanks to chassis and bodies it leased from Joe Gibbs Racing. Its alliance with JGR will end following the 2018 season, as FRR will shut down, not being able to afford the costs of the alliance while operating its team.
It doesn’t take a genius to see what they both have in common: The team buying the equipment beat the team that sold or leased it. What’s a team to choose? A check that can help develop more parts and pieces, not to mention hire more employees, but with the risk that it can get beat by the team it solid its equipment to?
“This started falling apart when Furniture Row started beating Joe Gibbs Racing,” SHR driver Kevin Harvick said. “Our alliance fell apart ultimately in the end because of the fact that Stewart-Haas Racing was beating Hendrick Motorsports and the crew chiefs didn’t like it, the sponsors don’t like it. Internally, it doesn’t go over well, and in the end, they fall apart.”
The alliances seem to work well … but only for a short time.
“They can work,” Stewart-Haas Racing driver Clint Bowyer said. “It worked last year for the championship. They’re not going to work for long because of greed and everything else. Could you imagine making a deal with somebody where you furnish them cars and everything else and never dream in a million years that they would go out and beat you for a championship? That’s a tough pill to swallow.
“And then how do I get out of it? I made this bed and I’m going to have to lay in it, but the next time the washer comes around, I’m pulling the sheets off this baby.”
Cup teams form alliances they probably don’t want to make, but the competition and economics of the sport dictate their necessity. JGR aligned with Hendrick when it first started in order to get established in the sport.
“Absolutely they work,” Team Penske driver Brad Keselowski said. “Gibbs is a perfect demonstration of that. They went from being an upstart that was partnered with Hendrick to be the powerhouse they are now. They work very, very well if done right.
“They’re not meant to last. They’re meant to be the starter job bagging groceries. … You learn the basics and grow.”
All of the alliances are unique in some way. JGR leased bodies and chassis to Furniture Row. If they didn’t continue their alliance beyond this year, Furniture Row would have had to give back all of its cars.
The SHR-Hendrick alliance was just chassis and didn’t include bodies. The current Penske-Wood Brothers alliance treats the Wood Brothers as pretty much a fourth team — the cars are prepared at the Penske shop. Ryan Blaney was a Penske driver in the Wood Brothers seat up until this year and doesn’t think there would be much angst if current Wood Brothers driver Paul Menard was beating the Penske three.
“We would all work together to be as good as that car if it was kicking our butts every week,” Blaney said.
Furniture Row and JGR had a good relationship in many ways, and Furniture Row team owner Barney Visser said they nearly reached a deal to continue the relationship. Visser, though, couldn’t get sponsorship to continue and decided to shut the team down at the end of the season.
Visser wouldn’t address speculation that JGR tripled the price of the relationship from a few million to close to $10 million but said the difficulty was trying to put a value on what Furniture Row provided.
“What Joe Gibbs [fee for alliance] was talking about wasn’t ridiculous,” Visser said. “His numbers were purely objective. … What we couldn’t agree on was how much we brought to them and how much that was worth spread over four cars. That was subjective. We were very close [to doing the deal] when we lost the big sponsor.”
Furniture Row Racing driver Martin Truex Jr., who is expected to join JGR next year, said he didn’t think the alliance issues caused the closure of Furniture Row. He said the time crunch of having to replace 14-race sponsor 5-Hour Energy was the turning point.
“I don’t think there was ever any hard feelings between either of the teams,” Truex said. “I thought everything, no matter how we did or the other team did, it was great situation for us to be in and here we sit with the opportunity to win another championship, and I don’t feel like it was any different than the first year we raced together.
“It can work. It comes with challenges.”
That relationship is more costly for the team buying the product, Truex said.
The JGR drivers understood the situation even though, as Denny Hamlin put it, “there’s times” when it can be frustrating to be beat by Furniture Row.
“It’s still up to them to go out there and get the job done,” Hamlin said. “You still have to have a great crew chief and engineers and people at the shop that take our information and take our cars and build them and sometimes make it better. Kudos to them for that.
“But it certainly is frustrating that you can hang that information out the door. But that information comes with a price tag. We try to figure out is that income worth the information that goes out.”
Erik Jones has seen both sides, driving for Furniture Row last year and now JGR.
“It was great at Furniture Row — JGR was giving us the wheel, they created the wheel — all we had to do was make that wheel a little bit rounder,” Jones said. “We didn’t have to build the wheel.
“So that is where Furniture Row’s advantage came from is they were really able to improve on what was given. It’s pretty straight up and fair — they’re feeding information back to us, stuff they are learning. I felt it was a helpful alliance and felt it worked good. But it is tough when you are JGR and see your alliance car running better.”
SHR felt the relationship with Hendrick was productive. Then it got strong enough that Ford wanted it as a team.
Once SHR signed the deal with Ford in early 2016, it didn’t seem as if the teams worked together all that well.
“We did get basic chassis and engines, and like any other racers, we were working on spindles and truck arms,” SHR co-owner Gene Haas said.
“I would imagine the other crew chiefs at Hendrick probably didn’t like it, and I think a lot of the crew chiefs started holding the parts closer to their chest. That’s true no matter where you race — even within a team, you get that.”
The alliances work in the Xfinity Series as well. Kaulig Racing has made the playoffs for two consecutive years as an affiliate of Richard Childress Racing and with its shop on the RCR campus. Stewart Friesen’s family team in the Truck series has an alliance with GMS Racing, and that alliance provided a boost for Friesen to make the playoffs.
Kaulig driver Ryan Truex said the resources that come with the alliance are the most he has had since he drove for Michael Waltrip Racing in 2011.
“I’m in all the meetings, I’m in all the driver debriefs — it feels like I’m part of the team and anything I ask and anything I need to know or want to know, they’re an open book with me,” Ryan Truex said.
“Having those resources around me has made me better this year and made me feel welcome and helpful and not afraid to ask for anything. For a team in its third year to run as well as this team does is [due to] the RCR alliance and being able to share that information.”
But the question will come up again: How long can it last?
In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter.
“It might not be the best situation at times and you might need to part ways, but it is a necessary kind of resource to bring in new owners,” seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson said.
“We have plenty of new drivers standing in the line; we don’t have very many new owners standing in line to come in. That’s part of what needs to happen.”