NHRA and its Teams Needs to Capitalize on Mistakes Made in NASCAR

Business, especially big business is not for the faint of heart.  Therefore, if you are in business and you see a competitor possibly having some difficulties, it is perfectly understandable for to capitalize on those your opponent’s difficulties to help enhance your own position.

This is the position that NHRA seems to be in. There is a possible chink in the armor of the monster of motor sports NASCAR.

Nationwide Insurance has decided to pull sponsorship from the second level of NASCAR series known as Nationwide Series at the end of the 2014 year. 

 NAPA has pulled its support from the Michael Waltrip Racing organization after the debacle that occurred at the Richmond event involving Waltrip driver Clint Bowyer and the MWR Executive Vice President of Business Development and General Manager Ty Norris.  

Bowyer’s action of spinning with eight laps to go and bringing out a caution along with Norris telling MWR driver Brian Vickers to pit, which would put Vickers a lap down and then put NAPA driver Martin Truex Jr. into the NASCAR “Chase to the Sprint Cup.”

NASCAR penalized the NAPA driver Truex fifty driver points as well as the other MWR drivers. NASCAR also penalized Waltrip 50 owners’ points along with 300 thousand dollars.

This effectively put Truex out of the Chase, which cost MWR nearly 3 million dollars in lost revenue.

This action caused NAPA to pull its two remaining years of funding of MWR estimated at nearly 18 million dollars a year.

NAPA in a press release last week stated, “NAPA believes in fair play and does not condone actions such as those that led to the penalties assessed by NASCAR.”

Now this past weekend Five Hour Energy, the sponsor for MWR driver Clint Bowyer, company president Scott Henderson in a statement regarding NASCAR and NASCAR President Brian France stated that,” "There's a lot of talk about integrity," he said. "When the guy who's in charge can say, 'I can do whatever I want and I'm going to do it and I just did,' I wonder about integrity. I want to make sure we can win in this sport, OK?"

There is some sentiment that Five Hour will walk from MWR at the end of the 2013 season.

With all of this said, I would hope to think that people who work in the marketing department at the glass palace in Glendora, along with some of the marketing people working for the NHRA teams would be burning up the phones to those agencies handling some of these NASCAR marketing partners accounts.

If Five Hour Energy does pull out of MWR over lack of integrity, then the NHRA should be talking to Coke in Atlanta about the exclusivity clauses Coke has in place not allowing other drink companies to be marketing partners with NHRA teams.

The NHRA must capitalize on this opportunity to exploit and opening and bring more money and new marketing partners to the sport of drag racing.

Now I know that NAPA has a presence in the NHRA with DSR, however, it might get NAPA to expand on that platform and activation.

However, Five Hour Energy would find a great home in NHRA if Coke would allow it, and Five Hour could do a three-year deal with a NHRA team for the less than the cost of one year in NASCAR.

With ESPN losing their NASCAR, deal at the end of 2014 and possibly as early as the end of this year as being speculated by some. I see this as an opportunity for NHRA to leverage ESPN to get better coverage and air times.

All of this would require the NHRA to get motivated and be aggressive with some of its partners to take advantage of these situations.

I understand that this is pie in the sky kind of thinking; however, if these two sponsors are not very happy with NASCAR, there is a possibility that others might be not overly happy with NASCAR and with what has happened over the past two weeks.

Therefore as I stated before, it might behoove NHRA and their teams to start working hard on some of these opportunities.

It would take a lot of back end work, such as getting a better television package, and maybe some expanded programming on ESPN, or MAV TV by doing pre and post-race coverage of national events.

Alternatively, look at doing something with Sirius XM radio to provide coverage of the national events on satellite radio to expand the drag racing media presence. The NHRA already steams its events from the announcer’s deck, on the internet; they could do the same with Sirius XM radio

In concluding, I understand that I am not in any of these marketing people offices at NHRA or at the respective drag racing teams. So maybe some people who are employed in these offices might be working on these opportunities.

 If so I feel the NHRA needs to put out the word, they are going to be aggressively seeking to expand their marketing profile to expand the sport and take advantage of these mistakes made by NASCAR.