Sledgehammer

It’s been a memorable year in motorsports.

NASCAR finally got the championship finish it has been looking for since it came up with the idea of The Chase. The NHRA celebrated 60 years of racing (yeah I didn’t know it was 60 years either until about halfway through the season, but that’s kind of how things are with the NHRA) with a look back at its often overlooked history as some new names emerged at the top of the points at the end of another tough season of racing. Formula One got even more exciting to watch, even as Sebastian Vettel destroyed the field while doing his best Michael Schumacher impersonation. It showed American race fans that a race car sporting the Red Bull logo can indeed win races and championships.

There was also a huge downside as IndyCar watched both a promising season and the life of one of its star drivers vanish in a blink of an eye in Las Vegas. I still think IndyCar has yet to reach bottom and there are some serious people who agree with me.

And while I could devote this entire blog to one sentence reviews of another 15 or so racing series, that’s not really what this is all about.

Too often the fans and the media forget that racing is a team sport. And while we all claim that we remember, how much do we really think about it? When the driver is the most visible member of the team and in most cases the most vocal, it’s easy to forget about the dozens (and in some cases hundreds) of people back at the shop who spend long hours building engines, designing and fabricating race cars, filing important paperwork like the payroll, answering the phone, sweeping the shop floor and even the things we take for granted, like driving the team transporters to race weekends.

These days, the people who are really the most important and most likely overlooked members of the team — and ask any team owner about this –  are the people who are assigned the task of finding sponsorship dollars.

There’s a lot of memorable phrases about money and racing — “If you want to make a million dollars in racing, start with five million” or “It doesn’t take cubic inches to win races, it takes cubic dollars.”

There’s a lot of them. And they’re all true.

When the great recession hit the racing business it started out like a huge tsunami hundreds of miles out to sea. Team owners saw it coming and some reacted accordingly, by tightening their belts and preparing for the worst, finding some comfort in  the historical fact that racing has survived these kinds of economic downturns in the past. Then there were some owners who reacted to the impeding changes by immediately cutting loose a substantial chunk of their workforce and then hoped it was enough to ride out the worst. Still others didn’t know exactly what to do and simply waited for it to hit, hoping for the best.

The impact of the economic downturn has been devastating to motorsports. We’ve watched well established teams in all racing series fold up their tents, while others have taken the option of fielding fewer cars. Consolidation has been the answer for yet another group of owners as everyone has adjusted to learning to survive with less and hope that there’ll be more money in the future.

Sales professionals I talk to tell me that the environment for finding sponsorship may be the worst ever. Gone are the days when all you had to do was show a potential sponsor how an association with a team and the series in which it was racing would result in a measurable return on investment. That often meant raising brand awareness which in turn would result in increased sales. Even business to business deals were fairly straightforward.

Now, a potential sponsor wants and needs more. A return on investment has a “must-have” element to it, essential to selling the deal to those in the executive suites who would easily be convinced to spend their marketing dollars on the NFL or college football or a major golf tournament.

“How will an association with your team grow my business?”

It’s not a new question, but it comes up more and more and it’s often not an easy question to answer. It separates the professionals on the sales staff from the wannabes. It requires that the team’s sales professional does their homework, learning everything about the potential sponsor’s business model and then figuring out how to make it work with the team’s. Successful sales people have done this type of in-depth research for years. It’s now become the norm.

It’s not easy. It’s a tough gig.

You think jumping over the pit wall to make a four tire change and filling the car with fuel or perhaps tearing a red hot engine apart and rebuilding it within a designated timeframe is a tough gig? Try coming up with an answer for your team owner when he asks you how you’re doing with finding several million dollars of sponsorship money for him — so that you can keep the team going. Oh, and while you’re at it, you can keep your job too.

Like I said, it’s a tough gig.

Look at the teams that were vying for the championship in their respective series this season. The teams at the top of the points are essentially the well financed ones. That’s no secret. Talent also needs a lot of money to win championships. You can’t have one without the other.

The 2012 champions won’t be just the best driver in their respective series. They’re likely to be the best financed, as well.

Nothing happens in racing without money.