Financial crunch can make for strange bedfellows

There's a whole lotta shakin' going on in the financial sector these days. The stock market across the board is more up-and-down than a piston at Talladega, the credit crunch has hamstrung the Wall Street wizards and folks are hunkering down, ready for just about anything that comes down the pike.

• Send Ron your thoughts
• More Business news

Disposable income is fast becoming necessary to the monthly nut, and that doesn't apply to just race fans; it's rampant throughout the garage area in NASCAR's top three series.

On Tuesday, word broke out of Charlotte that two teams were meeting to discuss a merger. Hardly big news these days, because it seems like all but the Big Four are trying to join forces, right?

Well, it's Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates doing the talking, and based on reports from Detroit, it might not be a big hurdle at all.

DEI is staunch Chevrolet, and always has been since the late Dale Earnhardt founded the team. Ganassi Racing has been a Dodge team since 2000, and it has been a NASCAR rule of thumb that Chevrolets, Dodges, Fords and Toyotas don't mix. That is, you can't have half the team in one brand and the other with a different one.

The reasons for this are many, but mainly, it's because the manufacturers aren't real keen on the other side knowing all there is to know about the technical gizmos and whiz-clanks they spend millions of dollars and man-hours developing. The goal of a manufacturer, of course, is to whip all the other manufacturers on a weekly basis, or at least often enough to provide room for all that advertising to work.

But recent reports from Detroit put General Motors and Cerberus Capital, which purchased Chrysler from Mercedes parent Daimler Benz last year, together at the bargaining table to discuss a merger of their own.

Sort of blurs the lines a little bit, doesn't it? (Continued)