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Kurt Busch to shake and bake (again) in Ricky Bobby car at Talladega

Kurt Busch will channel Ricky Bobby for another NASCAR race, this time driving a Wonder-sponsored Chevrolet SS, in this weekend's Camping World RV Sales 500 at the Talladega Motor Speedway. Unlike past tie-ins, though, there's actually an element of sponsorship here (the "Me" car was done when Busch was running on a team without sponsorship).
It was arranged by Flower Foods, the new owner of the Wonder brand. Wonder was part of the bankrupt Hostess company, which temporarily exited the US market 2012, and set off the Great Twinkie Shortage.
Busch has made something of a habit of channeling characters from famous racing movies, most recently running Tom Cruise's City Chevrolet livery from Days of Thunder in a Nationwide Series race earlier this year. Busch kicked off his movie-inspired antics, though, at Talladega in 2012, when he raced El Diablo's ("It's like... Spanish for like a fighting chicken") "Me" car complete with a cougar on the hood. He even went so far as to channel the lovable idiot that is Ricky Bobby during the race, dropping a few catchphrases about macchiatos and slingshots.

Chevy might've pulled out of NASCAR if it weren't for new Gen 6 car

We've been on the fence with NASCAR for some time now. On one hand, it's some of the closest racing anywhere in motorsports, with actual passing and door-handle-to-door-handle action as a matter of course. But on the other, it's become template racing - a personality-driven sport more about the drivers than any sort of loyalty to a particular automaker. The Car Of Tomorrow format really rammed that message home, with a racecar's identity coming down to little more than headlamp stickers slapped on the nose. That's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but we've wondered for some time what's in it for the automakers, who pay big money to stay in a series that has had little increasingly little do with street car sales, let alone innovation.
Apparently General Motors was beginning to wonder the same thing. In a new ESPN report, Rick Hendrick, team owner of Hendrick Motorsports, suggests that GM would have seriously considered leaving NASCAR if it wasn't for the move away from the COT to the new Gen 6 racer. According to Hendrick, GM North America boss Mark Reuss spearheaded the charge away from the 2007 COT and toward a racecar with clearer automaker ties - cars like the new Chevrolet SS racer shown above. Learn more about the fight for a closer-to-production look in the ESPN story at the link.
Now, if we could just get more rear-wheel drive V8 coupes into showrooms....

Was the C7 Corvette cut from Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show?

Someone was bound to receive a free 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray during the Super Bowl XLVII festivities; it just wasn't who we thought it was going to be. Despite a report back in December that superstar Beyoncé Knowles would be getting an all-new Corvette during her halftime performance, that turned out not to be the case. Joe Flacco, starting quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, did in fact win a Corvette for his MVP performance.
So what transpired that prevented Beyoncé from rolling on stage in the new Chevrolet? Anyone who knows isn't telling, but according to Yahoo! Autos, General Motors said that for one reason or another a deal "did not work out," and it appears to have been an eleventh-hour change. Regardless of who's to blame or what prevented this from happening, we're sure Chevy has had no problems getting attention for the C7 Corvette since it was introduced last month.