German motorsport web site motorsport-aktuel has posted a news on Wednesday, saying that car manufacturer Volkswagen could enter the top American stock-car scene just like Toyota did a few years ago.
Earlier this week, Hans-Joachim Stuck, the motor sport representative at VW, mentioned that the VAG Group would take a decision about their future motorsport involvement before the end of this week, and a NASCAR program was a possibility. Motorsport-aktuel says that there is currently speculation in the U.S. about whether VW would go NASCAR racing with a well-known driver such like Mattias Ekström, Danica Patrick or Jacques Villeneuve. Marketing experts believe that Toyota made a crucial error in 2007 when they decided to enter the NASCAR scene with little-known drivers such as AJ Allmendinger, David Reutimann and Brian Vickers. Since it is virtually impossible to achieve success in NASCAR from the word go, a car manufacturer would get more positive visibility and interest from the fans by promoting its drivers. VW has a huge assembly plant in the U.S. in Tennessee and sells 225,000 vehicles each year. But VW’s plan is to double that number in the short term. While down under in Australia to compete in the Gold Coast 600 Supercar V8 series, former F1 World Champion Jacques Villeneuve said NASCAR was now a possibility. "We were working hard on formula one, but we are looking towards other things like NASCAR now," he admitted to the Sydney-published Daily Telegraph newspaper, but without saying a word about VW. "We had everything in place for the 13th F1 team, but the FIA did a back flip. There was obviously something we didn't know about." "I wouldn't mind coming here and doing Supercar V8 full-time because it could be a lot of fun," said the 39-year-old world champion of 1997.
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