How much money were Sprint Cup teams getting from their manufactures?

June 24, 4:38 PMDetroit NASCAR ExaminerJosh Lobdell

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GM was giving it's Sprint Cup teams around 2.5 million dollar per year (Getty Images)

Lawsuits and court proceedings really a journalist’s best friend, especially when that journalist is charged with covering the super secretive world of NASCAR. Now that GM is in Federal bankruptcy court we can now learn how much money they were spending supporting their NASCAR teams.

In court documents obtained by Jayski and others from GM’s bankruptcy proceedings we learn that Richard Childress Racing was set to get 2,538,750 dollars on June 15th, 2009. We also learned that this was a quarterly payment for his race teams so RCR was set to receive a little north of 10 million dollars in support from GM.

Essentially we are talking around 2.5 million dollars per race team, and if we take that number a step farther we can get a pretty good idea of how much money GM was spending each year supporting its NASCAR teams. We already knew that GM was supporting RCR as well as Hendrick Motor Sports, Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing, and Stewart-Haas Racing.

Since those four teams were set to field 12 teams in 2009, it is very likely that GM’s budget for Sprint Cup series support was to be just north of 30 million dollars. That number does not include support for Truck or Nationwide series teams. There is no real way to surmise how much more money that entailed.

What we do know now is GM will now only support Hendrick Motor Sports and Stewart-Haas Racing, and it seems likely that this support will equal a little less than the 2.5 million per team GM had been paying.

What this means for the future of four cars at RCR, or the fate of joint engine shop, Earnhardt –Childress engines is. Richard has stated that he would like to keep all of his teams going, including his Nationwide series team. Since the support from GM is gone it is likely he will have to find additional sponsorship deal to keep the books balanced.

It seems the trouble GM’s NASCAR support, as is its main problem everywhere else, was that GM was just too big. It was trying to do too many things. Starting way back in 2005 its cross-town rival Ford Motor Company began making big cuts everywhere. Ford was second only to Dodge to pull its financial support from Truck and Nationwide series teams, and for the last few seasons Ford has only committed to funding 8-10 Sprint Cup teams.

On top of that Ford only has one Sprint Cup engine program, Roush-Yates engines, to worry about funding. Even after the cuts GM still has two in Hendricks and Earnhardt-Childress. It is not known how these cuts will affect those programs but they are likely to continue.