NASCAR team limit cap won’t happen

Jack Roush won't be the only car owner with five teams on the Nextel Cup circuit this season. Rick Hendrick will have five, too. So where does that leave Brian France's proposal to limit owners to just two or maybe three Cup teams? The stock-car world is still wondering just what France, NASCAR's CEO, was thinking when he announced, rather suddenly last September that he wanted to limit team ownership, ostensibly to open up the sport to more newcomers. But with the multimillion-dollar economic barrier to entry in his sport, France almost appeared to be thinking about an earlier, simpler era in its history. Five weeks after proposing a two- or three-team limit, France reset the number at four. And now it appears that everything has essentially been put on hold, at least until current sponsorship contracts run out, say in 2009. And it has become, in Kyle Petty's words, "a non-story." "If they limited us all to two, that would have made sense," Petty said. "Or three. But with four, it's not even an issue." Winston Salem Journal