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Dan Davis, Director of Ford Racing Technology, will step down on August 1, 2008. (Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR) ยป More Photos
Dan Davis, Director of Ford Racing Technology, will resign his position effective August 1, 2008.
When Dan Davis steps down from his position as Director, Ford Racing Technology on Aug. 1, Ford and NASCAR will lose a passionate advocate of racing and the benefits competition returns to companies involved in racing.
As head of Ford Motor Co.’s North American Racing operations since Oct. 31, 1997, Davis has overseen the company’s involvement in NASCAR’s top three series, as well as the NHRA, USAC, Grand Am and myriad other forms of racing. And in a time of unparalleled economic strife among the Big Three Detroit automakers, it was Davis’s job to make sure Ford’s racing dollars were used wisely.
While people can debate the value of racing for an automaker — any automaker — one thing that can’t be debated is Davis’s unshakable belief that Ford absolutely needed to successfully compete at the highest levels of NASCAR racing.
“From a marketing standpoint, any manufacturer is going to put money where you get your best return,” Davis said during an automakers’ summit last year at Daytona International Speedway. “In a marketing sense, we get tremendous return on racing in NASCAR. We’ve seen that in the past and it’s still there. These days, for a company like Ford that is struggling, you really have to maximize that return, so you put your money where you can really make a difference and you can do that in NASCAR. It helps us sell product and we know it, so as long as we’re able to see good returns on where we spend our money, we’ll keep doing this and we’ll keep doing it with vigor because you have to win and you have to do a good job. If there is ever a day where the return is not there, then we’ll look elsewhere, but, right now, it’s a really good return. You’ve got a fan base out there that’s
Still, even Davis understood that economic pressures Ford Motor Co. has experienced — most notably a $12 billion loss in 2007 — meant racing operations would be closely watched by the corporate finance people.
“Nobody has a buffer. If you’re a company like Ford, which has been losing money the last few years, they turn over every rock to figure out, ‘Are we wasting any money anywhere?’ Racing is a big program,” Davis said earlier this season. “The marketing side of it is a big project with a lot of money, so we get scrutinized just like anybody gets scrutinized. We ask ourselves those hard questions every year, so when a corporation comes in and asks us questions, we already have a lot of data and answers. But it’s always hard. For me, I would like the questions to be hard whether the conditions are good or the conditions are bad. If we’re wasting money, then we should be called on the carpet. If we’re not delivering value, then we ought to quit doing what we’re doing.”
Among the high points of Davis’s career were Roush Fenway Racing’s consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championships in 2003 with Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch the following season, as well as eight straight NHRA Funny Car championships for John Force and the hugely successful USAC Ford Focus Midget program.
There have been challenges as well in recent years. The arrival of first Dodge and then Toyota into the Sprint Cup Series has thinned Ford’s ranks considerably. At the moment, there are but three full-time Ford teams with a total of eight Sprint Cup cars — five from Roush, two more at Yates Racing and a single car for Wood Brothers Racing. Those eight cars are fewer than any other manufacturer has in the Sprint Cup Series.
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