NASCAR Teams Racing to Find Sponsors

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. â€”  Corporate sponsors involved in NASCAR Winston Cup racing received nearly $4 billion worth of exposure on telecasts last year, according to Joyce Julius and Associates’ sponsors report.

Those kinds of numbers should make stock car enthusiasts giddy over the future of their sport, but there is financial trouble brewing along pit row. An economic fallout from bankruptcies and wholesale personnel cutbacks has affected a number of teams, especially with the cost of running a Winston Cup car now in the range of $12 million to $15 million.

Hardest hit have been Carl Haas and Travis Carter, whose drivers, Joe Nemechek and Todd Bodine, are in Kmart-sponsored Fords.

“It came as a real shock when I heard Kmart was bankrupt,” Carter said. “For one thing, if you anticipate a problem arising, it’s not going to be at the beginning of the year. This thing caught us off guard. To hit us right in the midst of preparation for Daytona and the entire season, we’ve got to take a deep breath and really start thinking things through.”

Current plans are for the Haas-Carter Motorsports team to run here Sunday and next week at Rockingham, N.C., but after that, it’s problematical.

“Unfortunately, this is part of the reality of our sport,” Bodine said. “When someone like Travis Carter and Carl Haas go through a situation like this, maybe it will wake some people up and wake our sport up. We’ve got some problems and we better start addressing them.

“It’s not really that there are too many hands out, it’s just that there aren’t enough sponsors to go around. It’s hard enough to go through this halfway through a year and knowing you’ve got six months to work on it, but we’ve only got three weeks.”

Junie Donlavey has been fielding Winston Cup cars for 52 years and has Rick Mast in his Ford this year, but his sponsorship is good for only half the season. Mast believes that franchising, guaranteeing teams a place in each race, could be the answer for obtaining sponsorship money. It is a system used in Formula One and CART.

“If these teams and sponsors were protected by whatever means, like franchising, I know in our case this team would have a 36-race sponsor signed right now,” Mast said. “As it is, we’re good for only 18 races.

“All I know is if you’ve got a company that’s based at a race track and they buy 28,000 tickets for their customers and they have 30 hospitality tents going on with literally thousands of folks and that car doesn’t make the race and goes home, that’s a pretty big hit on them.

“These people that run these companies, all these executives, these people have pride and egos just like all of us do and they don’t like that.”

He could have been describing what happened to a lucrative sponsorship deal that Bobby Hancher’s team had from Tabasco a few years ago. A buildup that started nearly a year earlier at Indianapolis ended when Todd Bodine failed to qualify for the Daytona 500.

It’s still referred to as the “Tabasco Fiasco” in NASCAR circles.

“If I had a franchise, I would be in the catbird seat because I would know that I was gonna be in the shows,” said Brett Bodine, Todd’s older brother and owner of his own team. “You could take that to a sponsor and guarantee them something. Right now, you can’t guarantee anything. You can’t guarantee performance, you can’t guarantee finishes, you can’t guarantee you’re going to make the race, and that’s what makes this a very difficult sell.’”

Even four-time Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon, who would appear to be bulletproof as far as sponsorship money is concerned, admits finding backing is a difficult proposition.

“Believe it or not, during the whole time we were trying to win the championship last year, Rick Hendrick and I were in meetings trying to get sponsorship for the 48 car [driven by 500 pole-sitter Jimmie Johnson].

“I don’t have a clue as to how we won that championship because there were a lot of long, long days and headaches because sponsorships are not easy to come by these days.”

Tony Stewart’s Collection

If short-track favorite Tony Stewart from Rushville, Ind., wins Sunday’s Daytona 500, he may want to arm-wrestle Bill France Jr. and Mike Helton, plus car owner Joe Gibbs for the yellow and white Home Depot Pontiac.

Stewart has started a collection of cars from what he considers his major wins, and the Daytona 500 would surely be one of them. However, NASCAR rules mandate that the winning car Sunday will spend a year on display at Daytona USA.

His latest acquisition was Keith Kunz’s midget, which he drove to victory in the Chili Bowl at Tulsa, Okla., last month. Stewart offered his race winnings as a down payment to Kunz, a car owner from Columbus, Ind.

The 5-year-old car was also driven by Jay Drake when he won the 1998 Turkey Night Grand Prix, the Hut Hundred and the Pepsi Nationals in 2000 and the Chili Bowl in 2001.

“It’s been Jay’s favorite car for a long time, and he was sure disappointed when I agreed to let Tony have it,” Kunz told the Indianapolis Star. “But I know Tony is going to put it away for all the good reasons.”

Stewart said he had to have it because winning the Chili Bowl was an emotional win.

“I had butterflies for two hours after I won,” said the Winston Cup runner-up and winner of 12 races in three years as Gibbs’ driver. “I haven’t had butterflies for two years.”

Stewart has also bought Laguna Beach entrepreneur Steve Lewis’ midget that won last year’s Turkey Night race at Irwindale, and John Menard’s Indy Racing League car that he drove from the pole in the 1996 Indianapolis 500.

Stewart has even boxed up the clothes he wore while carrying the Olympic torch Jan. 7 in Indianapolis to display when he has his own museum.

Southland Notes

Perris Auto Speedway will open the stock car portion of its weekly Saturday night racing series with four divisions, including the unusual cruiser cars. In cruisers, there are two people, one to steer and use the brakes, the other to accelerate. New to Perris will be the super stock and street stock classes. ... When J.J. Yeley won the season-opening Sprint Car Racing Assn. race last Saturday at Perris, it was is the third time he had won the SCRA opener. His other wins, in 1997 and 1998, came at Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix. He also won the inaugural race at Perris....SCRA champion Cory Kruseman of Ventura completed his Indy Racing League test with a 207.6-mph run at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He was driving a Dallara-Chevrolet for PDM Racing.