France optimistic about crisis impact

This week NASCAR announced the signing of a new sponsor for their Truck Series after long-time partner Craftsman decided to stop their backing. Camping World signed a seven-year deal to become the new title sponsor for the series from next year.

Despite the good news, France admits to being nervous about how corporate America responds to the current financial outlook and how that will impact NASCAR, although he doesn't expect the series to be affected to the extent of other businesses.

"You know, you have to look at it over a long period of time," said France. "We're off, but only in sort of single digits as it stands now. We tend to fare much better than other industries thankfully.

"That's because sports are so culturally ingrained to fans. It's one of the last things that they want to not participate in.

"We're fortunate. We are nervous like everybody else. We're taking every precaution we can in terms of getting costs out of our system on behalf of the team owners, on behalf of the track operators.

"But this is also a time when you can't freeze either. You've got to still be aggressive and still push hard your product.

A number of teams are still trying to secure sponsors for next year in all three major NASCAR series and a few Sprint Cup squads are even seeking mergers with others in order to remain afloat.

Despite that, new efforts like Stewart Haas Racing have been able to sell nearly all their sponsorship space available for 2009, although their backing will come from companies that were already involved in NASCAR.

However, France revealed that he expects new companies to inject nearly a hundred million dollars in sponsorship in NASCAR next year. He admits though that the money is probably going to the best teams, which for him is normal in a performance-driven industry such as motor racing.

"I think the number is going to be close to between 80 and 100 million dollars of new money that is predicted to flow into NASCAR from a team sponsorship in '09," France said.

"Now, that's lower than we've traditionally had as a rate of increase. But nonetheless, with the backdrop of the economy we're living in today, it's fairly good.

"Most of the teams in the Sprint Cup level are well-funded. There are obviously some teams that aren't, but there are always teams that aren't. Some of that is based on performance, not necessarily the economy.

"So teams that tend to perform consistently well tend to do very well in the sponsorship area as you would think."