Time Machine: Switching Brands Is Old Hat

RacinToday.com

If Richard Petty Motorsports adds a Ford to its line-up later this year, it will not be the first time a front-line team has raced both the Ford and Chrysler brands in the same season.

Domineering, rich and uncompromising, when Carl Kiekhaefer headed south from Wisconsin to race in NASCAR’s Grand National division in 1955, he intended to win. With drivers such as Tim Flock, Buck Baker and Frank Mundy, the team of Kiekhaefer –sponsored by his own Mercury Outboard Motors company – dominated NASCAR for the two seasons he raced, including one lone victory with a Ford.

Running Chryslers and Dodges, Kiekhaefer’s team once won 16 straight races, a record unlikely to ever be broken. But during the 1955 season, when the rules didn’t suit him Kiekhaefer added a Ford to his line-up of Chrysler brands and won a race near Memphis with driver Alfred “Speedy” Thompson on board.

An industrialist who would eventually sell $2 billion worth of his Mercury Marine engines around the world, Kiekhaefer had a personal relationship with executives at Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Mich. Fully informed about the development of the C300 with its 300-horsepower hemi-headed engine, Kiekhaefer showed up at Daytona for his first race in 1955 as a quasi-factory team with one of the first of the new Chrysler models.

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