Racecar Driver - it Takes Driving Talent and Marketing Abilities

The sports professions like stick-and-ball, have an obvious pattern and filter where the quality and ability of an individual rises to the top. Your skill set and talent are found by scouts, either through college, amateur leagues or tryouts with the best becoming professional athletes. If it's a team sport, the quality of the team will help or hinder your advancement but in the end, the best will rise to the top.

Drivers need a marketing degree

In motorsports, this strict talent need isn't necessarily the case. Yes, you must have certain abilities to be able to reach a level where you can make a living; but in the world of motorsports, you need more than just driving talents. The driver must also have the ability to market themselves - see 'Marketing First' for insight into motorsports marketing. This includes knowing how to attract and bond with marketers or potential marketers (sponsors). That's where the rub is - motorsports is equal halves: marketing and race talent.

Racing had a lot of extremely talented characters in its past - including the greats listed here - but as the dollars became bigger and business became more and more an integral part of motorsports, those talented characters found they needed something more than just racing abilities; they needed marketing skills, too. The gruff was replaced by the gentile and gracious if somewhat gregarious. Now with women (like Danica Patrick, pictured) getting into the business, there's an even larger battle for marketing dollars and it takes a great deal of work to put together these programs (sites like Ernie Saxton help).

To prove how important the business end is in motorsports, current drag racers, Ashley Force and Hillary Will have degrees in marketing and economics (respectively). Many more drivers are being educated with the ins and outs of motorsports marketing and engineering at such colleges as IUPUI, UNC Charlotte and more (source - ESPN).

Unless you're lucky enough to win a big race (like Trevor Bayne did for the Woods Brothers at the Daytona 500 - source, SpeedTV), marketing funds can be a very hard search. Some people wonder why this or that guy, doesn't have "a ride". Well, if you delved into the backroom, so to speak, you might find the reasons have as much to do with marketing as they have to do with on-the-track talent (as stated here). And those marketing aptitudes may have a lot to do with both public speaking and sponsor acquisition. In this day and age of corporate sponsorship combined with a Recession, it takes everything a driver can deliver to keep funding coming into a team. In fact, it reminds me of the joke: Final results were posted from last Saturday's Bank of America 500 race in Charlotte. Of 43 cars who took the poll, only 36 finished as a result of 2 cars out for accidents, 2 for engine problems ... and 3 were repossessed by Bank of America.

It's no joke though - the teams with good front men can carry a team and put a competitive car on the track every week. As a current anecdote, interestingly Michael Waltrip, of Nascar, has had a less than stellar career both as a driver and as an owner (unlike his more well-known and much more successful brother Darrell). Yet Michael has ample investment from sponsors who are more than happy to be working with someone who understands their needs - Michael has developed into a superb businessman (as noted in InsiderRacingNews.com) and spokesman (see his latest TV ad here).

Top talent need not always apply

On the opposite side of the marketing world is Kyle Busch, who owns a race team in Nascar Trucks but recently stated he has trouble with getting enough funding for his operation. This coming from someone who is one of the great drivers of this era and dominates most truck races in which he enters. But if you've heard Kyle's brass comments and his capacity to upset everyone around him including himself (Google 'Kyle Busch comments' and it's an endless stream of foot-in-mouth disease), it's no wonder he can't keep sponsorships. Racing talent isn't everything. It's not unusual for top tiered racers to be racing one year and not the next. Another instance just happened where Tony Kanaan, a revered driver in open wheel racing, is left without a ride to begin this season after 7 Eleven pulled its sponsorship (source - Auto Racing News) of several years in IndyCar racing following last year. It was just a year or two ago that Tony was doing commercials for the giant convenience store chain and others like IZOD (see here).

So, in the end, it takes more than talent on the race track to be number one and on top in racing. As you can see, motorsports is much more a business with a consistent march at always looking for ROI (source, Sports Business Journal) than the happy-go-lucky arena of stick-and-ball sports, where the players never really grow up - Well do they?

Don't get me wrong, if you have enough talent, almost anyone can make money in racing; but to actively pursue motorsports as a job and career, it takes much much more than pressing down on the loud pedal. It takes a lot of speaking and pressing of the flesh. Hey, I'm surprised politicians aren't involved in ...

Note: Much of the information on marketing was sourced from Eagle2Motorsports.com