If there’s one thing that I miss about the ‘70s and ‘80s, it’s that, in those days, a driver had one job: win races.
If there‘s one thing that I miss about the ‘70s and ‘80s, it‘s that, in those days, a driver had one job: win races. OK, two jobs: win races and win championships.
Well, really three jobs: win races, win championships and sell tickets.
But, that‘s it, just three jobs!
That‘s what the legends did.
If you were a car owner, you were hungry to hire winners. Period. The fastest way to lose a ride was to fail to deliver wins.
There were three parties involved in a, sort of, partnership that benefited everyone: the track, the race team, and the sanctioning body. Each benefited from the other.
Obviously, without a track, there was no place to race. And without race teams there was no race. A reliable sanctioning body created a schedule that minimized multiple events taking place on the same nights, helped make sure race teams had a dependable purse structure, and helped guarantee the purse got paid at the end of the night.
As a result, the series provided the promoter with the ability to advertise a group of big name drivers that could be guaranteed to be in attendance.
With all three entities working together, everyone made a living.
As this column has pointed out several times over the years, the popular phrase, “Racing has always been expensive,” is just not true. Racing was a blue-collar sport.
The racing halls of fame are filled with racers who were not wealthy people and a great many of them, at least at some points in their careers, were able to field their own cars.
The notion of a $50,000 or $60,000 sprint car engine would have been considered patently absurd in 1978.
But, over time, as the sport became expensive, the three-way partnership evolved into a four-way partnership. In addition to the track, the race teams, and the sanctioning body, the sponsors (although I prefer the term marketing partners) became a fourth partner.
Whether on the car or as sponsors of events, the need for that additional revenue altered the business model.
One of the results of that change is that other factors, beyond a driver‘s on-track abilities, have come into play.
A car owner recently shared his experience meeting with his primary sponsor to discuss the new driver he was looking to hire. The company wanted to know who the new driver would be before signing on for another year. Fair enough.
But, in this meeting, the company‘s primary concern was the racer‘s social media presence, not how many races the team hoped to win.
The car owner and driver will remain anonymous. But I will offer that the driver is a talented racer.
In most forms of sports entertainment, the object is to hire the best-performing athlete. Sometimes a franchise is even willing to put up with some weird or annoying personality traits as long as the player‘s talent outweighs the additional baggage.
NFL fans wait breathlessly for the draft each season, hoping their team hires the best athletes possible.
Not once have I heard a discussion where draft picks were based on which player had a better following and posting schedule on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
But, in this instance, analytics experts joined the meeting, and immediately assigned an assessment score of the driver‘s social media presence. Their assessment was very favorable, and it was an important factor in the driver securing the ride.
Maybe I‘m just too old school, but I‘m having a hard time even imagining an early ‘80s sprint car team debating whether to hire a Doug Wolfgang, Jac Haudenschild or Jack Hewitt based on their Twitter profile.
Today‘s drivers are, of course, well aware that potential marketing partners are more excited about a racer who is also self-marketing and promoting their company and its products. Since race teams have very little advertising and marketing budget, there‘s no shortage on Twitter, for example, of tweets from drivers pitching sponsors‘ products.
Full disclosure, we also have a talented and dedicated team that posts to various social media, which you can follow on Twitter (@SprintCarMagz for Sprint Car & Midget and @speedsport for our sister brand, SPEED SPORT), and I‘ll be happy to converse with you on my personal account (@dougauld52).
Yes, it‘s an ever-changing world. But I‘d like to believe that in sprint car and midget racing, at the end of the day, ultimately it‘s the racers who win the most races who earn the rides.