Evolving Team Sponsorship Model Better Aligns NASCAR with Partner Goals

The sport of stock car racing is a pioneer when it comes to many aspects of sponsorship. The establishment of NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series over 50 years ago—the first major title partnership in sports—was one of the watershed moments that helped to establish sponsorship as a bona fide form of marketing.

But the sport’s structure differs in so many ways from other professional sports—a privately held company operating as both sanctioning body and multiple event/venue owner, star athletes contracting with teams absent any type of collective bargaining or players association, car manufacturers with an outsized role as suppliers and partners, etc.—that its sponsorship practices have necessarily diverged from industry norms.

Now, one team—RFK Racing, which will field three cars in the top-level NASCAR Cup Series next year—is taking an approach that breaks with a major NASCAR tradition but should offer better value to RFK’s top partners. Rather than primarily associating one sponsor with one car and driver, it is structuring partnerships that splash a single brand and paint scheme across multiple entries.

The reason, simply stated this week on X by team co-owner and driver of the #6 car Brad Keselowski, is “1) Our partners get more value due to increased access to our team with all three drivers and cars. 2) Our employees have increased assurance that if a sponsor leaves, we are significantly less vulnerable to not being able to fund a team.”

While that sensible approach might not sound revolutionary to marketers outside of motorsports, it upends a model that fans have been comfortable with since the 1970s and, most importantly, has been the foundation for their loyalty to sponsoring brands, which has long been among the strongest of any sport’s fandom.

The conclusion that RFK Racing has reached, and a direction that other NASCAR teams are likely to follow, is that the fan-preferred, single-sponsor model is not sustainable. There isn’t a valuation at which both the organization and its corporate partners come out ahead.Sponsors and properties usually only win when they make the needs of fans paramount. Without fan support, no partnership will be successful. But in this case, the math dictates asking fans to adjust to a new reality.

This won’t be easy. In addition to establishing a clear relationship between sponsor and driver, sponsorship has helped fans for decades solve a problem unique to auto racing: easily identifying their favorite driver’s car by its unique paint scheme. This is especially important when watching a tightly packed field of 40-plus cars moving at more than 150 miles per hour.

If fans can no longer rely on looking for a brand name splashed on the hood, NASCAR and its teams should explore ways to make the cars’ numbers more easily identifiable. That may be a tall task, especially for fans in the stands, but given all the advances in broadcast technology, it should be less of an issue to find a solution for TV and streaming viewers.

Once that challenge can be overcome, a shared sponsorship among teammates will become much more palatable to fans and brands can start taking full advantage of multi-car sponsorship opportunities in ways similar to their partnerships with other professional sports teams and organizations.