Indycar return for Franchitti unlikely

After his Sprint Cup team shut down earlier this week, there have been many rumors sprung up on what 2007 Indy 500 Dario Franchitti will do to get his racing career back on track. Dario will like everyone to know that a return to the Indycars is out of the question.

"Let's see what the future holds," Franchitti said. "I need to sit down with Chip and see where his head is, but NASCAR is where I want to be. I want to be successful here and I certainly don't want it to end like this.

"I made a big commitment coming over here and I'd like to get an opportunity to be successful."

"When I made the decision to come here (to NASCAR), I wasn't going to do the IndyCar thing anymore anyway, so this isn't a case of missing out on what could have been in IndyCar," he said. "That just wasn't a direction I wanted to go in. "Never say never, but it's unlikely I'll go back."

"We definitely struggled in the first couple of races, but we were getting there," Franchitti said. "The results have been this and that, but I really feel like we were getting there."

With a best finish of 22nd, yeah that is "getting there" alright.

"We were starting to run well, me and the No.40 guys all thought things were turning around."

Dario's misfortune has got him some sympathy from other drivers in the Sprint Cup garage.

"I think a couple things happened," Richard Childress Racing driver Jeff Burton said. "Dario is an accomplished racecar driver and I think he can get it done in the Cup Series, but it's going to take time. The question is, how patient can people be? And at a time when we don't have a lot of new sponsors coming in it's hard to build a company that wants to be patient. People that are wanting to make that investment want success right away.

"I think a lot of things stacked up against him and it made it harder for him than if he would have been able to have success sooner. Unfortunately Ganassi have been a little down, too. They haven't been as good as you would expect them to be."

"It's really shocking to us to see a team shut down like that, and it's tough," Roush Racing's Greg Biffle said. "You don't want to see that. Dario, I think, is a great driver. He's improved tremendously. He ran very well at Loudon, and qualified decently, but I don't know. Their organisation has been having a tough time competition-wise lately, and it's sad to see them without a sponsor and having to shut that down temporarily."

Four-time Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon believes the U.S. economy is to blame for Dario's bad luck.

"I think it's certainly a wake-up call, you know, any of us are vulnerable," Gordon said. "I would have never thought that they would have struggled getting sponsorship. I'm sure Chip Ganassi thought they wouldn't struggle. They probably didn't think they'd struggle on the racetrack as much as they have either, especially on the road course. We all can be vulnerable and it just makes you appreciate what you have, the sponsors you have, and it makes you work that much harder to try to stay competitive."

Plans about Dario's future may be announced next week, lets hope the boys at CGR aren't wearing rose-tinted glasses like Dario is.

Cup drivers sympathise with Franchitti [Autosport.com]

Franchitti says IndyCar return unlikely [Autosport.com]