The Roush/Yates 8-Car Team is Coming

Owner Jack Roush has apparently solved the riddle of getting back on top of NASCAR Nextel Cup racing.

It's all in the numbers. More of them, actually.

Roush Fenway Racing, which already shared an engine program with [Robert Yates Racing], will expand its relationship in 2008 to include building and selling cars and parts to its fellow Ford partner as well as licensing and marketing.

That ultimately will allow Roush after the 2009 season -- the deadline NASCAR has set for it to get to four teams -- to send its fifth car and whatever employees that might go with it to RYR.

"That's not part of the deal, but it certainly won't shock anybody here if in two years that's where it goes," Roush Fenway president Geoff Smith said before Saturday night's Nextel Cup race at Richmond International Raceway.

Yates announced the move to join forces with Roush on Friday.

Roush's Smith apparently thinks he's been absolutely cunning with the manuever of not saying that specifically Roush's "extra" assets will find a way over to Yates. Come on, dude, how stupid do you think we are?

This is all comes when Roush's resources seem already pressed much too thin within the organization -- as they have seemed to been since having the hoopla of five cars in the 2005 Chase.

The funny thing about the potential Roush/Yates eight-car conglomerate is that NASCAR -- more specifically NASCAR's VP of Competition Robin Pemberton -- is apparently already on board with it.

Asked again if this was Roush's way of circumventing the rules, Pemberton said, "There would be concern if you had everything in one facility. That's why we've gone to the four-car limit.

"There's business sense in buying cars and going and employing an engineering staff that has the resources that make your teams run better."

Kind of interesting, if you ask me.

NASCAR is trying to cut down on large car-count race teams by limiting each team's entry to four at the max. By doing so, the sanctioning body hopes to avoid one or two teams constantly dominating the sport because of their massive coffers of wealth and technology.

But yet, in the case of Roush and Yates, NASCAR considers cars being physically built just miles apart to not be in violation of that rule? Do they really thing technology and information doesn't travel outside of the Roush-Fenway Racing front door?

Consider the multi-car team can of worms opened.