Of buying rides and merger, etc.

[dando]

An interesting piece I dug up on ESPN.com:

http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/news/story?series=1&id=2439923


Sponsors have also left open-wheel cars for stock cars in droves -- turned off by the open warfare in open-wheel racing and turned on by the burgeoning NASCAR fan base.

Companies are in this for exposure, after all, which is what Joyce Julius & Associates measures. The Ann Arbor, Mich., firm calculates companies' sponsorship value based on the amount of airtime their logos get during races. The higher the TV ratings, the more that exposure is worth. The Julius measure allows for a lugnuts-to-lugnuts comparison of the leagues' cumulative sponsorship value in 2005: ChampCar $98 million, IRL $340 million, NASCAR ... $5 billion.

:eek:

EDIT: forgot to hit enter on my edit comments...not much new in the article, as it repackages info from various sources. However, IMHO it underscores the current state of affairs b/w the three series, and how diffcult the climb back will be. Not unpossible, but pretty darn close. :shakehead

And, yes, I agree that the $$$ for cabs must be for the complete package, but they also have 3x the schedule and 4x the ratings for a typical race.

-Kevin

[oddlycalm]

What was it that Sports Illustrated said, one the top 10 stupidest decisions in sports for the last 50 years...? That's about the best label that could be put on it.

The Julius numbers, which is what sponsors are looking at, demonstrate what I've been saying; even a combined series has a very tall task ahead of it. According to these figures a combined series wouldn't manage 10% of NASCAR's exposure and it would no doubt take a decade of hard and smart marketing and race operations to cut that difference in half IMO. I'll leave it to everyone to imagine for themselves what the chances of that happening really are...

oc

[gjc2]

Not to say there isn’t a big disparity, but remember that NASCAR has bigger fields and longer season with a lot more races and I’ll bet that that $5 billion is for truck, Busch and Cup combined.

George