As the 2008 holiday season continues to unfold, uncertainty about the 2009 economy, and with it the 2009 NASCAR racing season abounds.

With Dodge recently announcing plans to cut its 2009 motorsports budget, Dodge Motorsports director Mike Accavitti sat down to discuss some questions about the coming year.

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It'll be hard to top that victory that we had at Daytona, but we actually intend to try to do it again.

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-- MIKE ACCAVITTI

Q: Dodge has announced an extended closing of its manufacturing plants this winter, so in terms of general public perception, is there any connection between this and Dodge's participation in motorsports?

No, there's no connection. The extended plant closings, of course, are not good for business because we want to have our factories working at 100 percent-plus. So when you have factories down that means less revenue coming -- in so there's an indirect link between less revenue and everything that we do and everything that we spend.

But as far as our motorsports program and this extended break, there really isn't any direct link between the two of them.

Q: As the racing guy, is that maybe one of the tallest hurdles you've got to get over, in that you've got to defend motorsports -- either to the public or at a corporate level -- or on the corporate side, are they pretty much in tune with the value of motorsports?

Let me tell you, one of the things that I've been doing since I got back into the NASCAR thing a couple of years ago is to really try to dimension for senior management the benefit of our participation in motorsports. Generally it's a difficult thing and it hasn't been done well in the past, to really explain and analyze and provide data on why we should participate in motorsports.

It's too big of a leap to say a guy sees a car driving around the track and he wants to go into your dealership and buy one. So what we've set forth is to really try to put in some scientific measures to determine exactly how much influence does the fact that we participate in motorsports have on the purchase of our vehicles, and then how can we leverage that -- how can we leverage motorsports to drive more people into our showrooms to look at our great Dodge products.

So in our case, because we've put this effort in and tried to make things more scientific, during these hard economic times we're not asked to do anything differently. We have the information to analyze, we have the facts; the facts are what they are so we're able to spend appropriately.

Q: So regardless of the market conditions, do you have to market, and is NASCAR somewhere you feel you need to be involved?

What I always contend is that you need to tell people about your products. Some people just stumble into showrooms, yes -- but the majority of people need to know that you're out there and that you're making exciting, powerful, fuel-efficient vehicles -- and we use NASCAR as one of our platforms to do that exactly.

We advertise through a portfolio of media, meaning you'll see a television ad, you'll see a magazine ad, you'll see an Internet ad, you'll see us participating in NASCAR and you'll see us participating in rodeos. You'll see us touching people -- Dodge customers -- where they live and play.

And NASCAR is one of the areas a lot of our Dodge customers enjoy. And we participate in it. (Continued)