The corporate mandate to go global has already put General Motors into Le Mans for three years and is widely expected to have the company enter F1 sometimes in 2002 or after.
But it looks like GM will also enter a race series which has significantly little public interest in North America -- rallying.
While he was in England for the Goodwood Festival of Speed, GM's director of racing, Herb Fishel, paid a visit to the Oxfordshire company that readies Subaru's cars for the World Rally Championships. Now that GM owns a substantial part of Subaru's parent firm, Fuji, Fishel has a serious entrée into that facility.
In a conversation the next day, Fishel made it quite clear that he thought GM needed to be in the WRC if it was to have an opportunity to get its name in front of people who might not otherwise see it.
He talked about a Toyota advertisement for its rally program that showed one of its cars speeding past an old man, leaning on a cane, in the middle of nowhere, or at least the middle of nowhere for the car business.
In Fishel's view, it should be a GM vehicle that makes those impressions on people who currently do not have cars so that when they do become affluent enough to buy one, it is GM they are familiar with.
During his visit to the car preparation facility, Fishel decided he was going to assign one of his engineers to watch the construction and maintenance of the Subaru cars for a year so they would be ready to work on similar GM cars.