Dodge gets bumped from NASCAR, turns right: Motoramic Dash

"Rubbin', son, is racing," says Robert Duvall in "Days of Thunder," and no team has felt that more than Dodge, which had to snuff out its NASCAR team on Tuesday after it lost Roger Penske's team to Ford. It's a blow to the corporate ego, it's a disappointment to race fans, and it may be the best thing to happen to the company in years.

Since its return to NASCAR in 2001, Dodge has been a mid-pack competitor to Chevy and Ford, winning races here and there but rarely in contention for the overall series championship. One big reason: Despite running dozens of cars in every race, NASCAR only has a handful of top-shelf, fully funded teams. When Ford picked off Penske, who built Dodge's engines for all its entries, the Chrysler motorsports executives were left with unpleasant choices: either launch their own engine-building service, try to fund another high-quality team, or struggle through with underfunded teams.

Ralph Gilles, the head of Chrysler's SRT division, said Tuesday the company "couldn't go forward with a structure that met our standards." Dodge will finish out the 2012 season, but its departure leaves just Chevy, Ford and Toyota in NASCAR -- or to be more accurate, three types of decals applied to identical frames powering cars with nothing in common to the cars those automakers build. And that's where Chrysler's real opportunity lies.