FORD NEWS

Workers at Ford's St. Petersburg, Russia factory have been picketing since last Tuesday, but Ford has begun producing automobiles again anyway. Negotiations will resume Friday. The workers want.... you guessed it - more money. Yeah; I know, I wasn't up to speed on Ford's Russian employee issues either.

Ford of Brazil has posted 15 straight quarterly profits and has a 12% market share at present. At the dawn of the current millennium, Ford was beginning to consider removing itself from South America altogether. Now the Brazilian operations are helping to cover some of the parent company's losses in its home market of America. Tailored products like the EcoSport combined with heavy cutbacks (plant closures and employee buyouts) have aided the resurgence.



Ford plans to invest $200 million in its Kentucky truck plant and will receive $24 million (or more) in credits over the next ten years for doing so. The Blue Oval can't get away with laying off any more than 626 of the 4,137-strong workforce, either.

Marcus Gronholm will finish up his career this weekend in Wales. To capture the WRC driver's championship (as he did in 2000 and '02) in his Ford Focus rally car, Gronholm must take the race outright and see Citroen's Sebastien Loeb drop to sixth or worse. Ford will take the team championship for the second consecutive year.

Bill Thimm died six days ago. It's an interesting story. Thimm was just a teenager in the 1930's, leading tourists around a Ford factory when the Henry Ford took notice of him and his drafting talent and put him through school. Bill Thimm retired in 1974, got all Michael Jordanesque and returned to consult with Ford Motor Company in 1978 and then retired for good in 1987. Bill Thimm was 88 years old.

The Aussie Touring Car championship will be decided this weekend on Phillip Island. Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup in their Ford's must battle Garth Tander and possibly last year's champion, too. Rick Kelly and Tander are both Holden drivers. Ford appears to be in the best position to take the title. Lowndes has done so three times before - in Holden's and Whincup currently leads the standings. The V8 Supercars series is basically Australia's NASCAR, but raced with much truer examples of the nation's best-sellers. Picture Accord and Camry all liveried-up and tuned for total performance rather than the identical, old-tech, badged-up jobs of NASCAR.