Finding A Racing Sponsor - The Money Trail

Mike Mittler gets hit up all the time for sponsorship. Like most businessmen, the owner of MB Motorsports and Tanner Racing Products seldom says yes.

He has a trio of reasons.

Mittler owns his own NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series team, where he can control exactly how his sponsorship money is spent. And he already helps a couple of racers who run tracks near his shop in Wright City, Missouri, west of St. Louis. Lastly, few racers ever come in with a proposal solid enough to convince him to write a check.

"You just can't come into a business and tell the owner that you race at a local track and want him to write a check to you to help pay your bills," Mittler says.

"Why should I make a donation to that charity?" Mittler asks with a smile. "I don't even consider a request like that unless the driver can come in with a plan that makes sense to me as a business owner."

Then he gets to the essence of the hunt for sponsorship money, something that's often ignored by racers.

"I'm not making a donation," Mittler says. "I'm buying a product.

"That statement carries even more weight when you consider it comes from a man who sees both sides of racing.

Even the smallest Nextel Cup teams have someone on the payroll whose job is to shake the money tree and cut a better deal than the team down the street. They study the business world and find one or more companies that can benefit from having its name on the side of a race car. NASCAR's national television audience and the broad demographics have attracted sponsors to Nextel Cup that would have been considered a very unlikely fit 20 years ago.

In that sense, the "driving for dollars" effort is no different from that of amateur racers everywhere looking for a way to pay the bills. It is just on a larger scale.

"A lot of racers think sponsorship has to be in the form of a check," says Steve Fisher, a Vermont driver who races in the American-Canadian Touring (ACT) Series.

Fisher's cars and hauler carry the Days Inn logo. In return, his team gets free lodging at participating Days Inn motels near tracks on the series schedule.

"It isn't like getting a check to buy tires," he says. "But the money I don't have to spend on motels is money I can use for the car, so it works out the same way."

Trade-out sponsorships are often overlooked by local racers, says Tracy Fischer, who parlayed her interest in auto racing into Advantage Motorsports, a cottage industry that helps racers market themselves to sponsors and the public.

"There is a huge advantage for the sponsor in that they don't have to write a check," she says. "And for the racer, they also get more in value-let's say tools and supplies or engine oil-than what they could buy with the same amount of money from a sponsor."

But Steve Fisher says the trade-out concept often involves more negotiations than just asking for a check.

"We had a hard time getting Days Inn to commit the first year," he says. "The company had been burned by a driver who took their money and then ran only four races. They were pretty cautious about getting involved again.

"But Fisher did his homework.