Wheels: Pacific Northwest Car Collectors Celebrate 60 Years of Corvette History

Dario Franchitti Aims for History at Indy 500

“Short hair and long hair twice,” he said, feigning a frown.

Then, turning serious, he said: “The winner on Sunday will get around $2.5 million, but this is it. This is why we race.”

Franchitti, 40, has won three of the last six Indy 500 races, including last year’s. Sunday, he will attempt to become the fourth driver — and first since 1991 — to claim a fourth title.

Such possibility has Indianapolis buzzing. The cover of the race day program is a photograph of A. J. Foyt, Rick Mears and Al Unser, the only three drivers to win the race four times. It folds out to include the four others with three titles, including Franchitti and Helio Castroneves, the Brazilian driver who will also race Sunday.

Franchitti is quick to brush aside talk of No. 4.

“I know it’s the big story,” he said, “but I’m thinking the same way I do every year I come here: how do you win?”

Only when the talk turns to history does he grow introspective.

“I can relate to it a bit more that way,” he said. “To have won three and to be in the company with the drivers I am, for a kid from Scotland, it’s quite something.”

Franchitti, raised in Bathgate, with Italian roots, seems an unlikely candidate for an IndyCar historian, someone who revels in the tradition of the 104-year-old Indianapolis Motor Speedway ahead of the 97th running of its most famous race.

He grew up watching Formula One races and first raced in the 500 in 2002. He is almost professorial in his admiration of the past, and famous for it, too. At Wednesday’s Community Day at the track, several fans presented Franchitti with mementos of his favorite driver, Clark, who died in a crash five years before Franchitti was born.

Franchitti’s sense of history extends to his own life. He has kept the suits he has worn in nearly every professional race, and he subscribes to about 20 automotive magazines. For his birthday last week, his father, George, tracked down Dario’s first childhood go-cart from a farmer near Bathgate. He restored it and presented it to his son in an emotional exchange that was filmed by ESPN.

George Franchitti was an ice cream manufacturer who raced recreationally and passed his devotion to cars to his children. Dario’s brother, Marino Franchitti, has raced in the American Le Mans Series, and a cousin, Paul di Resta, in Formula One.

It took Dario Franchitti until his fifth Indianapolis 500 to take the checkered flag, but it was during his first race that the track stirred something inside him.

“This is the hardest track there is,” he said. “Racing here is the only thing in my life that gets better the more I do it.”

After winning the 500 and the IndyCar season championship in 2007, Franchitti left for Nascar with an eye on a new challenge. He lasted only one season, citing his fondness for the Indy 500 and the thrill of open-wheel racing, where significantly higher speeds are reached than in stock cars. “It’s the difference between flying a normal plane and a jet fighter,” Franchitti said.

Two years after his return, he won at Indianapolis for a second time. He was first again last year in a thrilling finish, despite starting 16th and dropping to last after a spinout in pit lane early in the race. This year, he faces a similar task after Chevrolet engines nabbed the top 10 pole positions. Franchitti and his Honda engine will start 17th.

“He’s the most technical racer I’ve ever seen,” the driver Tony Kanaan said of Franchitti. “Everything has to be just so for Dario in his preparation, and that’s why he’s so good on the track. He’s meticulous. We call him Princess sometimes.”

Franchitti looks like the consummate racecar driver. He has flowing black hair, streaked by gray. His face is framed by thick sideburns and his dark eyebrows peer out from above sunglasses, which he almost always wears.

At the track Wednesday, he scooted around the infield in a golf cart, signing autographs for fans and sponsors. He signed posters, milk jugs, tires and giant vodka bottles. He posed with the Borg-Warner trophy, named after an auto supply company, for a promotional photo shoot.

Finally he returned to his trailer, for a minute to himself before meetings with his engineers. Tacked to a door is an old-looking photograph. What looks to be another homage to the history of racing is actually a joke — a Photoshopped image of Franchitti’s face on a driver sitting in a 1930s-era racecar. It was a gift from his crew for his 250th start earlier this season.

“I can’t tell you what it would mean to cross the finish line first Sunday,” Franchitti said, looking at the picture. “If I do it, it will be part of history; then come find me.”

Advertising: A Shared History in Detroit Is an Ad Inspiration

The partnership unites Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical,” about the musical legacy of Berry Gordy and Motown, the record label he founded that is now owned by the Universal Music Group. The musical, scheduled to open on April 14 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is the beneficiary of an elaborate promotional initiative by the Chrysler brand that supplements the show’s own efforts to encourage ticket sales.

The centerpiece of the Chrysler brand’s support is a television commercial that has been running nationally since December, featuring Mr. Gordy riding in a Motown Edition of a Chrysler 300C sedan as the seminal Motown song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” plays on the soundtrack.

The commercial, created by a Chrysler Group agency, GlobalHue in Southfield, Mich., begins with Mr. Gordy at the original “Hitsville U.S.A.” Motown headquarters building in Detroit and ends with him arriving at the Lunt-Fontanne and declaring: “We are Motown. And this is what we do.” As Mr. Gordy enters the theater, the Chrysler slogan appears, altered to read “Imported from Motown.”

The words “ ‘Motown: the Musical’ on Broadway March 2013” appear, referring to the start of previews on March 11, and the address of the show’s Web site, motownthemusical.com, along with the Chrysler brand Web address, chrysler.com.

The commercial is believed to be the first time that a Broadway show has had such paid national television exposure as it prepares to open in New York. The commercial is in addition to a commercial that the producers of “Motown: the Musical” are running on stations in the New York market; the local commercial was created by SpotCo in New York, part of Reach4entertainment Enterprises.

The Chrysler brand will also buttress the show’s marketing with colorful signs to go up in coming days in Penn Station and Times Square. The signs display a Chrysler 300 Motown Edition, the Chrysler logo, the logo of “Motown: the Musical” and photographs of cast members of the show like Brandon Victor Dixon, who portrays Mr. Gordy.

The Chrysler Group is spending an estimated $6 million to $8 million to promote “Motown: the Musical.” The budget for the ads from the show’s producers, Mr. Gordy, Kevin McCollum and Doug Morris, is estimated at $2 million.

The automaker’s efforts extend beyond the product placement and sponsorship agreements that have become increasingly prevalent on Broadway as theater enters the realm of so-called entertainment marketing with television, movies and video games. Unlike the provisions of many of those deals, the Chrysler name is not being added to a lyric of a Motown song, nor are there plans to park a car in the lobby of the Lunt-Fontanne.

Rather, the partnership is about “merging both journeys, the journey of the Chrysler brand and the journey of Mr. Gordy and his music,” said Olivier François, chief marketing officer at the Chrysler Group.

“Motown is the most exported from Detroit of any music and, in this case, imported to New York,” Mr. François said. “It’s putting together the sound and the drive of Detroit. We were meant to meet.”

That thought is expressed in the national commercial, in which a narrator proclaims, “Because if cars are our city’s heart, music is its soul.”

That the partnership is centered on music is no coincidence. Mr. François, a producer of pop music in his native France in the 1980s, described the Motown catalog as “part of the American patrimony” that “will live forever.”

“And so is Chrysler,” he said hopefully. “Regardless of my passion for the Motown music and my respect for Mr. Gordy, I would not have pushed to tie a brand to Motown if there wasn’t this new Chrysler story,” Mr. François said, referring to “Imported from Detroit,” which was introduced in 2011 with a Super Bowl commercial featuring another famous Detroit music figure, Eminem.

“The Motown name has a huge value,” he added. “Does it have a huge value for any car? Maybe not.”

Mr. McCollum, whose Broadway credits include “Avenue Q” and “Rent,” invoked another musical to explain how the show and the Chrysler Group came together: “Kismet.”

“About a year ago, we flew to Detroit and sat down with Olivier and his team, and they pitched the idea,” Mr. McCollum said. “It’s about a collaboration between these two great American industries that came out of one place.”

Besides, he added, Mr. Gordy was “highly influenced by his early days working in an auto plant, learning that you have to put something out there people want.”

Mr. McCollum said he was glad to join Mr. François and Mr. Gordy in “celebrating Detroit when you’d think it’s contrarian thinking” to do so because Motown, Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical” are all about “the power of the American dream.”

The SpotCo campaign for the show — and a public relations effort by Boneau/Bryan-Brown in New York — play that up. The local commercial, for instance, extols Motown’s songs as “the soundtrack that changed America, the beat of a generation, the soul of a nation.”

The goal is “less transactional,” said Ilene Rosen, associate chief operating officer at SpotCo, and “more about synergizing the Motown and Chrysler brands to elevate both.”

As much as other Broadway producers would probably welcome a deep-pocketed partner like the Chrysler Group, the unique circumstances that produced the partnership may make it difficult to emulate, she added.