How NASCAR’s Superstars Once Earned More From Selling Fan Merchandise Than They Did From Actually Driving the Car

Many NASCAR teams and drivers are grappling for funding to keep their cars turned on today. Award-worthy dramas have gone down in recent years over their volatile financial situations. But this wasn’t the case always.

In a recent interview with the Business of Sport, Jimmie Johnson revealed how huge merchandise sales used to be back in the day.

According to the seven-time champion, drivers could earn more from merchandise than from driving their cars.

He said, “When I first started, granted I was a rookie, but I made more money in licensed souvenir sales than I did driving the car, and then call it 2010-12 somewhere in there, it flipped and started going the other way.”

He did not have an explanation for this phenomenon and claimed that there were many factors at play. An educated guess can be made that one of the biggest reasons is the aging demographic of fans and the promotion’s failure to attract the younger generation. Hats, pens, and jackets cannot be sold to every yesteryear fan out there.

Also, NASCAR has failed to produce stars like Johnson and Gordon in the past decade. Fans don’t come to race tracks with an undying passion to watch their favorite driver secure victory any longer. The focus is more on the sport as a whole, per what the promotion has always wanted. This reality is far from an ideal one.

Jeff Gordon explains the need for star power in NASCAR

A major reason for the downfall of NASCAR viewership in the last decade or so is the retirement of major stars like Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. The national audience has been in desperate need of a can’t-miss attraction since the days of these drivers and is yet to be satisfied.

The four-time Cup Series champion Gordon has spoken in multiple stages about this. He said in 2023 that teams need to build their brands up so that they are not hurt when drivers quit.

In his words, “I think we have a role as race teams to build our brand up, maybe not as much as the star power of the driver, but in a way where drivers… “

“We’ve seen this recently with Jimmie Johnson, Dale Jr., and myself, several big drivers that have huge fan followings stepped away from the sport, and I think it had a big impact on the sport. Because the fans seem to not have a connection to the team as strongly as they did to the driver.”

When fans identify themselves with a driver or a team strongly, they eventually end up as fans. This is the first step towards pushing them towards purchasing merchandise. But it all begins with an attractive image of a driver or a team being created and built. NASCAR is quite a distance away from doing that.