Diecast Diaries: Dodge’s triumphant NASCAR farewell

After a short break, Diecast Diaries is back. This week the spotlight is on Brad Keselowski’s first NASCAR Cup title, which coincided with Dodge’s exit from NASCAR.

Last weekend Keselowski became Team Penske’s most successful driver in terms of race wins with 60, eclipsing Mark Donohue’s previous long-standing record. He now has more than 10 percent of Penske’s total win haul – which stretches across IndyCar, Formula 1, sports cars, and Australian Supercars as well as NASCAR.

The Michigan native had already firmly cemented his place in Penske folklore way before the landmark win though. In 2010 he gave Penske its first NASCAR title when he won the Nationwide (now Xfinity) series title in only his second year with the organisation. Two years later it was the big one – succeeding where an all-star cast of predecessors had come up short, Keselowski finally gave Penske its first top-tier NASCAR title.

Despite wins at Bristol, Talladega, Kentucky, Chicagoland, and Dover, Keselowski didn’t have the highest victory count of the year, although he was the first driver to notch up three wins that season. A strong run of top-10 finishes during the middle of the campaign was enough to ensure that he not only beat Clint Bowyer, but also Jimmie Johnson, who had dominated NASCAR in the late-2000s.

Keselowski’s championship win was the eighth drives’ triumph for Dodge, and the brand’s first since Richard Petty’s sixth title way back in 1975. It was something of a bittersweet event though, because as Keselowski crossed the finish line in Homestead, Miami on November 18 2012, it marked the final time Dodge would compete in NASCAR’s premier series.

Not long after the 2012 season started Penske announced it would be returning to the Ford fold for the first time since 2002, simultaneously shutting down its in-house Dodge engine programme as it instead decided to bring in its Ford engines from Roush Yates racing – the same company that supplies all of Ford’s entries.

By the end of Penske’s decade with Dodge it had become the only major team running cars from the brand. The marque had unveiled a new car for 2013, when the ‘Gen 6’ rules were introduced, but despite looking for a major organisation to run its cars (and more importantly, build its own engines) there were no takers, leaving Dodge out of the highest level of stock car racing for the first time since 2000. Since then there has been countless rumours – almost all with little substance – of a Dodge return, but with no major team to align to and very little money in the coffers, any hope of a return for Dodge is highly unlikely.

While the move may have led to Dodge’s NASCAR extinction, it has been tremendously fruitful for Team Penske. In just over six years since Penske went back to the Blue Oval, it has already achieved 39 Cup wins (eight more than its 10-year total with Dodge), and doubled up on its Daytona 500 and Cup title hauls.

Diecast Diaries is a regular series where I tell the real-world stories of the cars in my personal collection of diecast racing cars.