Ginn sells out: Got in over his head, then got ahead

It was barely one month ago when Jay Frye, head honcho at Ginn Racing, was talking boldly about trying to make a run at adding star driver Kyle Busch to the fledging race operation.

Of course, that was about a month after Frye had talked boldly about making a run at adding supernova superstar driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. to the fledging operation.

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All of which was less than six months removed from team owner Bobby Ginn's bold proclamation that he knew what he was getting into and that he had grand plans for the organization formerly known as MB2 Motorsports.

When it was MB2 Motorsports, it didn't try to kid anyone -- least of all those in the operation itself. It was as competitive as it dared try to be, but it never pretended to be one of the big boys in the sport of Nextel Cup stock-car racing. It more or less just quietly went about its business, trying to survive as a lower-tier team in a sport becoming more and more dominated by the giants such as Hendrick Motorsports, Roush Fenway Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing, Richard Childress Racing, Penske Racing and Dale Earnhardt Inc.

Perhaps that was Ginn's greatest error. He thought he could be different.

In the end, he couldn't pull it off. So with the announcement set for Thursday that Ginn Racing is merging with DEI, effective immediately, the great Ginn experiment pretty much is snuffed out before it got much of a real start.

Driver Mark Martin as recently as two weeks ago talked about Ginn Racing being remembered as "the little team that could." In the end, they were just another little team that couldn't.

More details are expected to be forthcoming Thursday during a news conference at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the new DEI-Ginn partnership will be rolled out for participation in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.

But this much we know already: Ginn bit off more than he had the horsepower to chew when he charged onto the NASCAR scene as owner, taking over the MB2 Motorsports operation late last year. He immediately hired 75 new employees and poured millions into infrastructure upgrades such as two corporate jets and a seven-post shaker rig that even some of the sport's super-teams had yet to purchase.

Then the No. 01 car of Martin's nearly won the Daytona 500 -- and for the first six weeks of this season, the Ginn operation was the darling of the Nextel Cup circuit. The honeymoon between Ginn and his latest adopted sport, however, was shockingly brief.

First came the layoffs and restructuring of the operation a few weeks ago, which was only a prelude to what Ginn really had in mind. He already wanted out as the lead man responsible for the mess he had created by expanding too fast -- before he had secured the sponsorship dollars necessary to cover his tracks. (Continued)