GM Pulling Support from Sprint Cup? Tell Us Something We Didn't Expect

General Motors said this week that they are scaling back factory support from NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series only days after they announced they were ending support with the Truck and Nationwide Series.

Wow, tell us something we didn’t expect.

GM pulling their support, even partially, has been the biggest non-secret for months. The financially troubled automaker filed for bankruptcy recently after months and months of trying to stay afloat.

This past April first a respected media outlet reported that the Obama administration-who is overseeing the automakers government bailouts- would require the automakers to pull their support from NASCAR. Turns out the piece was written as an April Fools joke. It created a swirl of controversy and the publisher had to eventually pull the piece and issue an apology.

Well guess what? What started out as a joke is now becoming a reality. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I predicted that it would. I reasoned then that once the automakers were taken over by the bean counters that only the bottom line would matter.

And with motorsports it’s hard to find any tangible concrete evidence that spending money in the sport will pay dividends to stockholders. Right now the biggest stockholder are the taxpayers of the United States and they aren’t buying it.

So this week’s revelation that GM has told Sprint Cup teams they will be reducing their support shouldn’t be a surprise.

But what is it exactly that teams get from GM? They get technical along with financial support estimated to be between 10 to 20 per cent of the teams' budgets. MORE-->>