In fairness, Franchitti was saddled with a second-level team that ran out of funding before the season was even half over. Funding had been an issue all season, since it seemed like Franchitti was running a new paint scheme each week.

He’ll be replacing Dan Wheldon, who will part ways with Chip Ganassi’s open-wheel division after this season.

Good on Franchitti. It’s a shame that he’s had such a miserable season. He qualified for only 10 races, and was almost never a factor. He had shown improvement in his final tries — a 14th at Pocono and a seventh at New Hampshire a few weeks later — but the money dried up.

But give the man credit for giving it a shot.

Franchitti (at right with fellow open-wheel expat Juan Pablo Montoya) had accomplished pretty much all he could in the IRL and was one of the few household names in that series. Short of making a run at a Formula One ride — and at 35, it’s probably too late for that — he had nothing else to prove in America’s top open-wheel series.

He’ll always be welcome in publicity-loving NASCAR, so long as he brings his megastar wife, Ashley Judd.

Could he have succeeded in NASCAR with a more stable operation? It’s hard to think that he wouldn’t. Driving skill is driving skill, no matter the discipline; it just takes a new terminology and some adjustment to go from open-wheel racing to NASCAR’s behemoth cars.

He showed that he could run well, as evidenced by the top-10 at New Hampshire. But there’s a large step between the occasional top-10 — which is currently the standard at Ganassi — than running consistently at the top.

If Franchitti were in one of the Hendrick/Roush/Gibbs/Childress cars, we’d have a better sense of what kind of success he could ultimately achieve.

Instead, he becomes the highest-profile driver to become a casualty of the difficult economy.

(Photo by Reed Saxon/Associated Press)