Junior taps brakes on idea of car swap

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Chevrolet has not received an official request from Dale Earnhardt Jr. to swap race cars with Honda driver Graham Rahal.

Earnhardt and Rahal are both sponsored this year by Army National Guard, and Rahal reached out to Earnhardt last week through Twitter to see if NASCAR’s most popular driver was interested in swapping cars.

The Twitter conversation sparked tons of fan interest, and the National Guard said it wanted to be part of a swap,but Earnhardt quickly quieted talk two days later when he said he could not drive a Honda. Chevrolet and Honda are direct competitors in the IndyCar Series.

Jim Campbell, the U.S. vice president of performance vehicles and motorsports for Chevy, said Saturday the manufacturer would consider any proposal to drive an Indy car from Earnhardt, but until then any talk about a manufacturers’ conflict is premature.

“If we get a proposal, we’ll take a look at it and we’ll look at it with an open set of eyes. The rest is hypothetical,” Campbell told The Associated Press. “Broadly speaking about any Chevy driver that is currently on our roster, if they decided to go race in another category or series, of course we’d love to see them in Chevys. There’s no doubt about that.

“In some cases it works out like that, and in some cases it doesn’t.”

Earnhardt has driven only Chevrolets since his 1996 NASCAR debut.

His two races in sports cars were in a Corvette. He drove a Pontiac in two seasons of exhibition IROC competition in 1999 and 2000, but all drivers in that series drove identically-prepared Pontiacs.

He is also the owner of a Chevrolet dealership in Tallahassee, and his late father’s dealership in North Carolina is still operating.

Chevrolet fields cars in IndyCar for both Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi, two owners who also compete in NASCAR and could offer Earnhardt a car to drive.

Kurt Busch, who drives a Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing in NASCAR, will drive a Honda for Andretti Autosport in the Indianapolis 500. He was encouraged by Chevrolet before completing the deal with Andretti to work with a Chevrolet team for Indy, but the manufacturer ultimately agreed he could drive for Andretti.

Sports, Pages 27 on 03/30/2014

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