Industry News

Major league baseball is at the other end of the spectrum. It may not seem like it, but there are very few secrets in baseball. The details of nearly every contract a team owner undertakes must be reported to, and approved by, the league. And most eventually end up in the press.

Racing team owners, by contrast, keep the value of their deals secret.

We know little about how much team owners (we call them "sponsees") charge sponsors, so all we can do -- those of us who care at all -- to monitor the economic strength of the sport is count how many sponsorship deals are being done from year to year. We count the number of names prominently displayed on the cars.

It's useful to know how many sponsors are active in the various forms of the sport, as well as what industries they represent, of course. But the lessons we can learn from such an exercise about the financial condition of the sport are limited.

That’s a conclusion difficult to ignore when pondering the promotion just announced by the folks at Johnson & Johnson.

Thematically, the marketers of Tylenol seem to be on the right track with its new product – actually, a brand extension -- called Tylenol Extra Strength Rapid Release Gels. The speed of its relief of pain is the featured product benefit, so racing is an obvious choice for a sports tie-in.

Problem is, J&J has will not sponsor a racing team. Instead it will spoof the idea. It has signed personal services contracts with a group of leading NASCAR drivers and will use them in TV commercials. One of those spots has already begun airing. It shows a number of drivers reacting to the supposedly surprising “speed” of a “Tylenol Team” car. One never sees the car, of course, because it does not exist.

Tylenol will also use the images of two of the uberstars, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., in point of sale ads. Plans for the promotion, described as the biggest ever for Tylenol in sports, include Tylenol giveaway items at eleven tracks on the Cup circuit this year. That means NASCAR, and the tracks, join the selected drivers in getting a nice piece of the action.

But what does this amount to? You got it. Johnson & Johnson has mounted a sports promotion that it could have done in any sport. It ignores the one benefit of motor racing offered by no other – the chance to be a competitor, to be an intrinsic part of the action.

It is suggested that Tylenol could not have done a traditional team sponsorship promotion because NASCAR is already tied in with another analgesic, Goody’s Headache Powder. One wonders whether participation in some other form of racing was ever considered.

So, the success of the program will boil down to how NASCAR fans – famously loyal to brands that support the sport – react to this “team” idea. The answer will turn on whether the program is considered support of the sport, or just sponsorspam.

Back in 1972, Can-Am innovator Don Nichols went to the Sports Car Club of America with an unusual request: Would it consider bending the rule requiring use of commercially-available fuel in race cars to accommodate a new team sponsor?

The SCCA, learning that the sponsor wanted to test the ability of a high-performance Chevrolet engine to survive in competition on lead-free gasoline, gave its approval. The UOP Lead Free Shadow was thus born. UOP, now a unit of Dow Chemical, promoted the effort to support the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign to end the use of tetraethylene lead (TEL) on American roads. The UOP team’s use of unleaded gasoline -- specially blended high octane gasoline though it was – served as spectacular proof that lead-free fuels could reliably be used in all types of gasoline engines – even 800-horsepower big block Chevys.

The UOP Lead Free Shadows, driven by Jackie Oliver and George Follmer, were a popular feature of Can-Am competition. (Full disclosure: I was UOP’s first racing program P.R. guy.)

The UOP promotional effort contributed to the effort that saw Congress decide to mandate the use of lead-free fuel, along with catalytic converters, in all road cars to help reduce air pollution. More than 200 million cars have been equipped that way since then. Ironically, the racing and aviation industries, claiming that TEL should still be used to boost octane ratings for fuel used in high performance engines, were exempted.

And that brings us to the fuel question in modern racing. The Indy Racing League will switch from wood-based methyl alcohol (methanol) to grain-based ethyl alcohol (ethanol), and the Hemelgarn team will promote the fuel with ethanol industry sponsorship.

So it seems a bit strange that NASCAR continues to insist that it knows of no reliable way to boost octane in racing fuels without the use of lead. One wonders if the folks in Daytona Beach have checked in lately with its fuel sponsor. Sunoco was an early (the 1920s!) developer of alternative octane boosting compounds.