Busch alone won't reverse decline of Gibbs' No. 18 car

J.J. Yeley never really had a chance.

He couldn't have turned the opportunity down, of course. The prospect of driving for Joe Gibbs Racing, an organization that's won three championships in NASCAR's premier division, is a dream for anyone who makes a living short-tracking it around dusty ovals in anonymous little towns. But Yeley, like Tony Stewart a former open-wheeler who won all three major U.S. Auto Club titles in one season, was doomed to fail. And unless something changes on the No. 18 team, Kyle Busch might be, too.

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Before sponsorship costs cracked double-digit million dollars per season, the black and green car backed by Interstate Batteries won the Daytona 500 with Dale Jarrett and the championship with Bobby Labonte, achievements that spurred the Gibbs team on the road to greatness. But the same year Labonte won the title, something else happened -- UPS and Viagra jumped into NASCAR with massive sponsorship deals, raising the price of poker so high that many players were forced to abandon the game.

For teams that harbor legitimate hopes of making the year-end Chase for the Nextel Cup, sponsorships are now worth double what they were seven years ago. Sponsors have to fork out serious dough just to back a vehicle capable of winning races, and the pool of companies willing to do that has grown so shallow that they're fought over like the prettiest girl at the prom. Some sponsors decide the investment isn't worth the return, and drop out of the sport. Others soldier on, even if it means trying to play a level above their heads.

Gibbs' No. 18 car began to slide from the ranks of championship contention just as sponsorship dollars began to track an opposite course. Within three years, Labonte had dropped from a top-10 position in points to 24th. Yeley finished 29th last season as a rookie, and stands 21st entering Sunday's event at Michigan. Busch, a four-time winner on the Nextel Cup tour and by any standard an immense talent, steps into the car beginning next season.

And he'll need help from more than just Interstate Batteries to make it work. The company founded by Norm Miller was the first sponsor the Gibbs team ever had, pledging to back the coach's new NASCAR effort before a shop had been constructed or a car had been built. Without Miller's commitment, Joe Gibbs Racing as we know it likely would not exist today. The Gibbs team, a place where loyalty is a cornerstone, has never forgotten that. At the racetrack, the No. 18 truck is still the team's command hauler. The bond between Gibbs and Miller, two devout Christians and close friends, is so strong that there will always be a place for Interstate Batteries on one of the team's cars.

"You started Joe Gibbs Racing, really, with your commitment," Joe Gibbs, away at Washington Redskins training camp, told Miller in a taped statement played during the announcement Tuesday formally introducing Busch as the team's new driver. "We appreciate you making days like this possible."

It's a wonderful, noble sentiment, but today Interstate is a relatively small player in an arena where millions are tossed around like $5 bills. Miller's company employed 1,251 people and generated $754 million revenue in 2005, according to Hoover's market intelligence. Compare that to the other two primary car sponsors in the Gibbs stable -- FedEx, which employs 260,000 people and generates $32 billion in revenue, and The Home Depot, which employs 364,000 people and generates $90 billion in revenue.

Officials with multi-car teams always say that everyone has the same equipment and the same resources, and to a large degree that's usually true. But it's also true that a team's performance on the track is often a direct reflection of sponsorship involvement, and that the vehicles that run best within multi-car organizations are those with the most solid backing. While there are exceptions -- most notably at Toyota, where deep-pocketed sponsors have very little to show for this season -- you usually get the level of driver and team that you pay for.

Gibbs signs Busch

Kyle Busch has signed with Joe Gibbs Racing to drive the No. 18 Chevrolet beginning in 2008.

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Interstate has never been the highest-dollar sponsor in the Nextel Cup garage area, but team president J.D. Gibbs bristles at the notion that the No. 18 team is underfunded. Once you add associate sponsors, he said, the No. 18 team gets as much money as Stewart's No. 20 car or Hamlin's No. 11 team, neither of which have associate sponsors.

"The 11 and the 20 cars, FedEx and Home Depot have those whole cars," Gibbs said. "From Day 1 with Interstate in 1992, they've been the primary sponsor, and we've been able to sell off associates. What happens is, when you do the primary and you add the associates, you come back up to where the 11 and the 20 are. Obviously, that's predicated on running well and winning races. That won't always be the case. But currently, that's still the case. When your cars go to the track, and the way we look at funding these teams, they all bring in roughly the same amount, and it goes into a pot and it's split among all the guys. Cars, engines, chassis, development, engineering, that's split among all the guys. So really, each car, you wouldn't know the difference, financially. It's the same for everybody."

So what happened with the No. 18 team, which once stood among NASCAR's elite?

"We've got a first-class group of guys," he said. "All the engines are the same, all the chassis are the same, all the cars are the same. That's a pretty good foundation. For whatever reason, we had a hard time, and J.J. will tell you this, getting him exactly what he needed to go fast. We have not been able to give him what he feels he needs to be able to go fast. But it's not a financial issue. You can say, hey, change the guys around. We've been through that. We're not slow to make changes if we feel like we need to make a change. But I really feel we've got a group of guys ready to go, and it might be the best thing for JGR and for J.J. to have a clean start."

They'll get that with Busch, introduced Tuesday wearing a new Interstate Batteries shirt. Miller in the past has sold his sponsorship to other companies looking for limited-race deals, and spoke Tuesday of searching for a sponsorship partner that could handle as many as 15 races for the 2008 campaign. He also hasn't ruled out the possibility of a split deal along the lines of the Kellogg's/Carquest arrangement on Busch's current vehicle at Hendrick Motorsports.

The presence of Busch, a blossoming 22-year-old who's proven he can consistently challenge for race victories, will surely help in that search. You would hope that Busch or agent Jeff Dickerson asked the Gibbs brass hard questions about the decline of the No. 18 team, and received some guarantees before signing on. Because for all the luster of the Gibbs organization -- and there's plenty of it, all justly deserved -- the kid universally regarded as the best young talent in the garage area has a new ride that hasn't won a race in four years.

"Whether I'm third on the pecking order or not," Busch said, "I think the 18 team at Joe Gibbs Racing has always been the No. 1 team, because of course, they were the first team here."

In the minds of his new bosses and teammates, some of whom have been around since the Gibbs-Miller connection was forged 16 years ago, that's probably true. But in today's NASCAR, that alone isn't enough to get Busch into Victory Lane.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.