Sponsorships in NASCAR are a multi-million dollar affair that fuels the livelihoods of drivers and teams. But the far-reaching effects of the same are intrusive to the innate character of a driver according to Spire Motorsports star Corey LaJoie. Conversing about the personalities of his fellow drivers in the Cup Series on a podcast recently, he mentioned that the companies that spent so much on sponsorships wanted them to be stable and predictable individuals.
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LaJoie felt that this expectation was a giant hurdle for the drivers to be themselves. Citing that NASCAR his fellowmen were dorks and no fun, he explained, “It’s a little bit of a product of the system where you are so dependent on being squeaky clean for people that you’re asking to spend tens of millions of dollars with you to put their name on the car.”
“They want somebody that’s not going to be on the edge. Just not gonna fire off a tweet at midnight or repost some tweet about some meme, right? They don’t want those guys.”
He also noted that the drivers showed some personality when they were out of their element at charity events. But at the racetrack, when they were being closely monitored, they tended to be focused on carrying themselves by the values of the brands that were sponsoring them. For LaJoie, this meant that his fellows were no joy at all.
While his predicament can be understood, it should also be noted that sponsorship accounts for around 65-80% of a NASCAR team’s total revenue in a year. The top guns in the grid bring in about $10-20 million a year from sponsors.
With such huge numbers being at stake, the expectations of sophistication from drivers lean towards the fairer side of the scale.
Sponsorship dependency plays a huge role in NASCAR results
Corey LaJoie also talked about how the on-track performances of drivers were dependent on sponsorships, unlike in other sports such as football. Using the example of Patrick Mahomes, he expressed that all the quarterback would have to do better on game day is hit the gym, do some sprint runs, and have some kale smoothies because his performances did not depend on cutting-edge technology or a skilled workforce that was being made available by a sponsor.
He added, “If we don’t have sponsors on our car, we’re not going to be able to pay people. We’re not going to be able to get the Cutting Edge technology and our performance is going to falter. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the gym or if I’m in the simulator 10 hours a day. Unfortunately, the coal that fuels our sport are those marketing dollars.”
With several instances from the past dictating how an unacceptable usage of words or actions can result in the loss of millions of dollars in sponsorship, drivers keeping themselves guarded on the racetrack is a rather obvious reaction.
