Ganassi, like Steelers, buckled down and let results do talking
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C.
A bleary-eyed Chip Ganassi apologized in advance Monday if he appeared too tired. He stayed home in Pittsburgh to attend the AFC championship, a can’t miss event for true Steelers fans.
The racing mogul then praised the Rooney family for the way they’ve always run their business — behind the scenes, quietly, allowing their football team to do the talking.
Ganassi said he’d like to model his own approach to his race teams after the Rooney’s style.
In a way, though, he’s a lot more like the football team and its blue-collar city than he’d ever admit.
In a rough economy that shook race teams to their core, Ganassi buckled down and made every strategic move possible to keep his organization afloat. He stared down every critic who predicted his demise, using it only as motivation to strengthen his race teams.
The result was the most successful year in a career spanning more than two decades.
All six drivers under the Ganassi umbrella reached Victory Lane last season, while Dario Franchitti claimed the IndyCar championship and Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas teamed to win the Grand-Am Rolex title.
There was Jamie McMurray’s season-opening victory in the Daytona 500, followed by Franchitti’s win at the Indianapolis 500 and McMurray again at the Brickyard 400. The trifecta made Ganassi the only car owner to sweep the three biggest races in America, and his 19 victories spanning three different racing series was a team record.
That he was successful in IndyCar and Grand-Am surprised no one. It was the breakthrough by Earnhardt Ganassi Racing in NASCAR — McMurray and Juan Pablo Montoya combined to win four races, three of them crown jewels — that took the skeptics by surprise.
“It’s just a matter of making a plan and staying with your plan,” Ganassi said Monday during the first stop in the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour.
But that wasn’t always easy considering the uncertainty surrounding his NASCAR team. The economic crisis in NASCAR at the end of the 2008 season thinned Ganassi’s sponsorship stability, and it took a merger with troubled Dale Earnhardt Inc. to keep both teams afloat.
Ganassi inherited driver Martin Truex Jr. and his sponsor, Bass Pro Shops, in the merger, but Truex waited less than half a season to announce he was moving on at the end of the year. About the same time, Ganassi faced a serious health issue that kept him away from the track and unable to answer the mounting questions about the future of his race team.
What he was able to do, though, was keep those external distractions away from his organization.