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NASCAR’s traditional sponsorship model normally involves a company writing a large check to a race team, or the sanctioning body. This gives the company the right to promote their product or service through car paint schemes, logo placements on driver’s fire suits, at-track activations, and the like.
The company might provide product samples to teams and fans at the track, but the primary driver of the sponsorship is the marketing and exposure opportunities the sport offers. Teams in turn use the sponsorship money to pay operating expenses, and find ways to make their car faster, and win more races.
Almost a decade ago, however, this traditional sponsorship model began to evolve. Microsoft
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In recent years the trend towards sponsorships that feature smaller checks and more technical alliance has continued. Companies that can provide products beyond software are growing their footprint in the sport by directly helping race teams get an edge on the competition.
One of the most recent examples of this is the partnership between Legacy Motor Club and D3O, a company that specializes in products used to protect against impact and dampen vibrations. The products are used across a wide range of industries including the Department of Defense, NASA, Formula 1, and now NASCAR.
For a NASCAR team like Legacy that means using the products to help improve driver comfort and safety.
“We’re making real dollar spends in these areas,” said Joey Cohen, VP of Race Operations at Legacy. “it’s just like any other industry… we’ve embraced technology, we’re putting real dollars towards that.”
The DO3 partnership brings value to Legacy by supplying items to the team that can help with the racecar while giving the sponsor brand exposure.
“It’s kind of the new ecosystem in motorsports for sure,” Cohen said. “And you know, what can we bring as an equal partner value to somebody like D3O or somebody in other technology spaces? It’s because … we’re applying real dollars to those areas.”
That new ecosystem that has teams embracing new technologies and new ways of doing business.
“Ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, we barely had computers in the garage,” Cohen said. “…barely had Excel spreadsheets; if anything, it was a Microsoft Excel (that) would’ve been the main technical partner. But that’s just changed a ton.
“We’re just following the ways of the world really. You know, once you learn something, you just can’t unlearn it… we’re constantly after relationships and these things that we’re going to utilize.”
According to Cohen the introduction of the Next Gen car opened up a whole new world when it came to new partners taking an interest in the sport. The Next Gen platform is similar to a GT3 sports car and companies with a presence in other motorsports series saw an opportunity to market their products in a new space.
“It’s exposed us to technical partners that we just didn’t care about because we weren’t building cars like this three or four years ago,” Cohen said. “We were fabricating everything ourselves. We were getting bare metal and producing Hendrick Motorsport parts, Penske racing parts. We weren’t coordinated as much with these vendors.”
The Next Gen car, however, has opened a floodgate of new sponsors ready to take a chance on NASCAR. And it allows teams to try different things found in other racing series.
“We’re in a very rapidly evolving environment right now in the series as when it comes to technology and the things that we’re trying to do,” Cohen said.
Most of the Next Gen cars have common parts and pieces to increase parity across the field and keep costs down. This leaves teams are left with very little room to try and find some sort of performance advantage. One of the areas though is that of driver comfort and safety. And that’s the area that D3O and Legacy focused on with the Next Gen car, which is probably the safest NASCAR has ever raced, but maybe not the most comfortable.
“This sport has had a reflective moment of how do we make the car safer? How do we make things better?” Coehn said. “Credit to NASCAR and the teams, we’re always striving for that…(but) there’s never a final destination on that.
“The real interesting aspect we noticed about D3O was they had applications we were kind of already using them and didn’t know it. And then you open up the conversation with them and find out that they have a lot more advanced methods and items that really served a good function around driver protection, driver safety, just driver comfort even.”
Keeping the drivers safe and comfortable allows teams to get the most out of their investment, mainly by prolonging driver’s careers. And that is what Legacy and D3O began to look at.
“How do we make them where they feel better when they get out of the car, where Monday they’re not sore, or when they have a big impact, they’re not sore,” Cohen said. “You know, those are things we could start to examine.
“You know, the typical method of safety development typically in motorsport is reactive, right?… when something bad happens, we do something about it; this was the first opportunity I really saw as a method for what can we do to start being proactive. How we can dampen out some of the vibrations that the drivers experience in the Next Gen car, things like that… how can we do things that are proactive in that realm instead of waiting for the driver to tell us that he’s uncomfortable or this is an aspect of the car that he doesn’t like. So that was the real unique situation here with D3O for sure.”
The relationship with D3O isn’t a one-way conversation, however. Legacy feeds information back to the company that can help D3O make improvements to their products used in other applications like defense.
“If there’s something that upholds a certain standard for a race car driver going 200 miles per hour,” Cohen said. “Why not give it to an American troop that’s in a Humvee or a tank?”
Jimmie Johnson is the co-owner of Legacy Motor Club. He’s also a driver with 83 Cup wins and 7 NASCAR Cup series titles. He’s seen how the sponsorship landscape has changed over the years; but thinks it’s also cyclic in a way.
“In some ways, I think motorsports and the relationships and partnerships that are coming about kind of go back to the roots where we are a test bed for new technology,” Johnson said. “(In the) sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, it was really about the cars and the auto manufacturers and what they would race on Sunday, they would try to sell on Monday.
“But, you know, technology has many facets to it. And as motorsports continues to evolve the technology that we bring in to create safety and or speed on track continues to evolve.”
The envelope that teams can now work in with the Next Gen car is smaller than ever with rules that don’t allow for much pushing of that envelope.
“We’re racing in a spec car now, we’re not building widgets like we once did,” Johnson said. “The technology has now shifted into quality control, shifted into safety software, a variety of lanes that we just didn’t really explore or have access to in the past because of the rules and where we needed to race and where we could find the best return on investment. But as the margins get smaller and the cars are more equal, we’re racing in these finite little areas.”
One of those finite areas is safety.
“And thank goodness for that,” Johnson said. “You know, the advent of soft walls and Hans devices and all that has really taken a big chunk out of the safety issues we’ve had. So now we’re in those small little areas and we love these new partnerships that come about and love being able to implement them in our racing world. “
In addition, the teams can now offer something back to sponsors as well.
“I heard a stat the other day that one year in racing is 10 years of experimentation and research and development in the real world,” Johnson said. “Just the frequency and the conditions we put products through… it would take 10 years outside of the motorsports world to work through these life cycles of products.”
The products that D3O provides to the team help make the cars safer, but also help with driver exhaustion.
“This might sound crazy, but the vibration that comes through the car and being able to dampen that vibration certainly helps the driver from a fatigue standpoint in these physical vehicles that we got to wrestle around the racetrack.”
As for a performance advantage, knowing a car is safer than it ever was, even more so with the type of products D3O provides, gives Legacy drivers the confidence they need to push the envelope inside the car a bit further, go deeper into a corner, and go faster. Drivers know that if something does happen, they push the envelope too far and crash, it won’t be as bad as before.
“I mean crashing hurts,” Johnson said chuckling. “We all know that and, you know, D3O’s technology that they’ve brought on board thankfully I’ve yet to really test it and I hope that I don’t personally have to test it anytime soon, but man, those, those moments stick with you. And when it stings it’s like touching a hot stove, you’re like,’ nah, I don’t want to do that again’. If it was warm and you end up touching it again and you’re like, ‘oh, okay, I wasn’t as bad as I thought.’ You get a little more confident around the stove.
“It’s the same thing in a car. I mean, you stick one in the wall and you’re like, man, that really hurt. You subconsciously think about that when you’re in situations and if you’re able to really manage those subconscious thoughts in a different way… especially in a world where we’re dealing with single digit percentage points that really separate first to last and that’s from the technology standpoint and for speed in the cars to really the driver’s commitment and the driver’s talent… the entire field’s qualifying within a half a second; that’s actually a big spread in a race anymore. It’s probably less than that. So, any little anything in those small little margins are making such a difference in today’s world.”
Today’s world in NASCAR has companies ready to provide sponsorship in a form other than simply writing a check. Meanwhile teams are looking for any sort of performance advantage they can find. With companies like D3O providing their expertise to Legacy the team is finding just that.
“You know, our drivers feel better, perform better,” Cohen said. “We’re running better; we’re contending for wins, attracting more partners, attracting better things.
“It just all feeds the ecosystem.”
