Voicebox

After the 2020 season, the GEICO Honda team shut down after more than twenty years in the sport. GEICO, the title sponsor, decided to spend its money elsewhere, a constant fear for all teams in all motorsports. In the heyday of NASCAR in the 1990s, when teams gathered huge sponsorship deals, companies didn’t have to choose between the hood of a race car and a targeted ad on a cell phone via Google or Facebook. The bean counters know how effective those digital ads are, so it’s a lot harder to convince them to spend big money to get on the hood of a car or the radiator shroud of a dirt bike. Sponsoring a team gives the corporate execs access to other corporate execs at the races, and a race day bro-down session could result in a business deal that justifies the sponsorship. Maybe the team can collect enough data, like customer emails, to compete with Google’s digital attack. Or maybe a marketing VP just likes racing. Such opportunities are few and far between these days.