MOTORSPORT: Make or break for Ambrose in US

A decade ago Marcos Ambrose was the top gun in V8 Supercar racing. Since then he’s driven almost 200 races in America’s premier series, NASCAR’s Sprint Cup.

Tasmanian-born, Ambrose won a lot in a comparatively short V8 Supercar career, including the championship in 2003 and ’04 -- but not at Bathurst. And NASCAR has been a even harder road, initially in the third-tier pick-up truck series, then the second-tier Nationwide Series, and ultimately the main game -- the Sprint Cup.

In this biggest league of American stock car racing Ambrose has won twice in 191 starts. Both those wins were at the Watkins Glen road course in upstate New York, a track most famous for having hosted the United States Formula One Grand Prix decades ago.

In all his time in America, Ambrose is yet to truly conquer its oval tracks – and he admitted this week, ahead of a new 36-round season starting with the Daytona 500 in Florida on Monday morning, Australian time, that not winning on one of them had become a “burden”.

“A box yet to be ticked,” Ambrose said.

“This year is all about getting that out of the way.”

It will be Ambrose’s sixth full-time season in the Sprint Cup – and his fourth with Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM), the team owned by the man who was the sport’s most successful driver with 200 race wins, including seven Daytona 500s, and seven Cup titles.

Although Ambrose’s average finishing position in the series has been 20th – and he was 22nd last year, four places behind teammate Aric Almirola – he has earned career prize money of almost US$23.8 million (almost A$26.4 million). Not all of that will have gone into Ambrose’s pocket – probably a lot less than half, perhaps about 20 per cent.

Still, he’s done very nicely financially.

But lasting recognition in NASCAR demands he win on an oval track. This year. Or it may be too late.

Ovals – some shorter than 800 metres, most 2.4km, some (like Daytona) as long or longer than 4km – comprise all but two rounds of the Sprint Cup. Racing on them is a black art and there are lots of Americans, especially those having grown up driving on dirt-track speedways, who are masters of it.

Ambrose now must have driven many more kilometres on ovals than he did on road courses in Australia and Europe in his young days in Formula Ford, Formula Three and V8 Supercars. Yet success in American races in which drivers keep turning left all day has eluded him – at the top level at least.

“I’ve been competitive. I’ve had opportunities to win [in the Sprint Cup], but never been able to make it stick,” Ambrose said.

“There’s something missing … I feel that burden.”

Ambrose and Petty, the 76-year-old known as ‘The King’ but unable to continue as a modern-day team owner the success he had as a driver last century, are outwardly optimistic about the new season. But so are all the other teams and drivers.

The Petty team narrowly averted collapse a couple of years ago but was rescued by New York taxi tycoon Andrew Murstein and Canadian-born Doug Bergeron, whose computer wizardry has made him billions of dollars.  

“I’ve seen over the last 12 months the commercial success RPM has had has really reinvigorated our race team,” Ambrose said.

“We’ve added a lot of human resources to our program for 2014. We've created a research and development program -- and that’s the first time that’s happened since I’ve been here.

 “I’ve seen it at its darkest days and I’m really looking forward to 2014 because I think it's the year Richard Petty Motorsports can break out and really show everybody the maturity that it now has.”

Petty has declared RPM “in the best shape we’ve been in the last three or four years”.

“Everybody knows we went really to the bottom a couple or three years ago when our car owner [George Gillett, who also owned Liverpool FC] went bankrupt or whatever,” Petty said.

“[Now] We've expanded our engineering effort and we can do more of our own research and development, rather than just take what Roush Fenway gives us."

Yet RPM remains very much Ford’s third-ranked team, behind Roush Fenway and Penske. And Ford is ranked third among the participating manufacturers, behind long-dominant Chevrolet and Toyota.

More than ever this is a make-or-break season for Ambrose, who will turn 37 in September.

A recent article on athlonsports.com, the website of one of America’s biggest sports publishing houses, branded Ambrose’s 2013 season “a nightmare”.

It highlighted that not only did he fail to win for a third time at Watkins Glen -- where he always starts a huge favourite -- but that he failed to notch a top-five finish anywhere for the first time in his Sprint Cup career.

It commented that Ambrose was seen in NASCAR as “a one-hit wonder – as in only hitting it out of the park on one type of track [road courses, the other one being Sonoma in California]”.

“He needs to work on the ovals,” a crew chief from a rival team said.

“He seems to be either in contention or completely out to lunch… He needs to find a balance where they’re able to score decent points every race on ovals instead of being so inconsistent.”

The article concluded that: “Amid a deep pool of impressive young drivers working their way up through the ranks, improved results for Ambrose might be necessary for the former Australian V8 Supercars champion to stay with Richard Petty Motorsports for a fifth season in 2015”.

Petty only contracts Ambrose a year at a time and said he was unsure how long the Aussie wanted to stay in America.

“His big deal is if he can win a race on an oval track,” Petty said.

“That would be the optimum for him. If he did do that he would probably go home and say, ‘Thank you, guys’.”

Then again, having labored so hard to make it in this so foreign of racing territories, Ambrose might just get to like the taste of oval success.

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