Dodges at disadvantage?

Manufacturer seeking help to regain competitiveness

CONCORD, N.C. (AP) -- Their championship hopes ruined when Sterling Marlin was lost for the year with a neck injury, the Dodge camp is seeking help from NASCAR to salvage the season.

Dodge officials head into the UAW-GM Quality 500 at Lowe's Motor Speedway this weekend contending the Intrepid's engines are underpowered and the cars are at an aerodynamic disadvantage.

"We've had somewhat of a catastrophe the past few weeks," said Jim Julow, vice president for Dodge Motorsports. "With Sterling being injured, that put a big hole in our plans. And we've seen that our cars have not been real competitive, and we still have not had any rules relief."

Marlin, who had the strongest Dodge all season and led the Winston Cup standings for 25 straight weeks, was ordered out of his car last week when doctors discovered a broken vertebra in his neck.

So Marlin, the defending race winner, won't be in the No. 40 Dodge for Thursday's qualifying and he won't be able to finish his quest for his first Winston Cup title.

His injury has left Dodge without a championship contender this season -- Bill Elliott is a distant eighth in the points and Marlin, the only other Dodge even in the top 20, will continue to plummet in the standings as he misses the final six races.

It's just short of devastating for Dodge, which returned to NASCAR last season after a long absence from auto racing and has come close to being a consistent contender. Marlin finished third in the championship standings last season and the Dodges have six victories this year.

But none have come since late summer, when Ward Burton and Elliott put the Intrepid in the winner's circle in three straight races.

Since that stretch of Dodge domination, NASCAR allowed the Chevrolets and Pontiacs to extend their front air dams, and Dodge officials believe they've suffered from it.

Chevrolet drivers have won five of eight races since the rules change, with Fords taking the other three. In that same time, the Dodges have failed to run up front -- the top finishing Intrepid was Burton in 10th at Talladega last weekend and the next closest was Kyle Petty in 16th.

"You look at the Chevy performance, it took them a few weeks to sort it out, but they're strong now and a large part of it has to be based on the new nose," Julow said.

It's not clear where the Dodges need the most help. They've been complaining to NASCAR for months that their engines are underpowered, but deficiencies in aerodynamics have become a new issue since Chevrolet got its help in August.

"We've got a menu of requests into NASCAR that we think can help," Julow said. "We don't want to put all our eggs in one request, so we've given them a couple to select from and hopefully they will because it's frustrating after our early success to be struggling like this."

But NASCAR, which heard the latest Dodge complaint on Tuesday, is unlikely to provide any assistance before the end of the season.

"If they are talking about being at a disadvantage with the motor, then they have been all year," NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter said. "It's the same motor all year and they led the points most of the year with that motor.

"So we just don't think it's appropriate, with as few races as there are left on the schedule, to do anything. There's not much we can do to help them."

That's unsettling news for Dodge, which thinks any sort of relief from NASCAR could do wonders for the cynicism its teams currently have.

"It's tough to run out there thinking that, at best, you have a 15th-place car," Julow said. "That's a tough work week and our performance over the past weeks indicates that's always likely. It's tough to keep people's head in it when that's the case, so any kind of relief could have a huge psychological benefit."

 

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