Is it not a good thing that SCCA was able to sell a title sponsorship for the national racing series?
Possibly.
Ok, Dick and Dave, I'll hold my fire until we see the details. As we know, that's where the devil is...but at first glance, I have two issues with series sponsorship in amateur Club Racing: it's mandatory and it intermixes the sponsor with the sanctioning body.
On the first point, no matter how this is detailed, it's not "contingency sponsorship". Contingency sponsorship is an
optional system where someone will pay a racer
contingent upon their finishing results and their running the sponsors decal(s). The key difference here is that contingency sponsorship is
optional. What if you choose not to support the sponsor, either that you're confident you won't do well enough to take advantage of the program, you don't like the sponsor, you have a competing sponsor, or you simply don't want to put a sticker on your car? Well, regardless of the reason, you can
choose to not put that sticker on the car and
choose not to accept the reward. I personally will never put an advertising sticker on my car unless I have something to gain, and in some cases I've consciously chosen to forego potential contingency sponsorship because of disagreements with the company (do not infer this to mean I have an issue with this specific sponsor; I do not).
But with a series sponsor, you do not have that option. These decals - and it's "sponsorship" - are
mandatory, whether you can benefit from it or not.
Further, when one accepts series sponsorship and mandates advertising on
all cars, it is incumbent upon the sanctioning body to ensure that
all competitors benefit from the sponsorship, not just those fortunate enough to do well. Once you accept series sponsorship it
cannot be divided out based on results, especially in non-professional club racing; with
mandated sponsorship support comes
mandated racer support. You force me to run a sponsor decal, I damn sure better be getting something in return, even if I wreck out on the first lap.
Finally, when one intermixes a sanctioning body with a series sponsor, lots of ugly things can happen. Look what's happened to professional motorsports and series sponsors, not to mention its effects on other sports. I'm not breaking out the black helicopters here, but who's to say what this deal really entails? What kind of deals did it take for the Club to make such a sea change? Again, I'm not saying that anything is happening - I really doubt it, especially this early in the game; after all, most things do start with good intentions - I'm just saying that there's a distinct potential for apparent improprieties, certainly the more intermixed the Club gets into these kind of deals.
I suggest my concerns really come down to the mandate and the decal. Had Topeka spent this effort to gain such a series sponsor and
one, made it truly a
contingency sponsorship (i.e., made it optional) and
two, did not provide the
appearance of potential impropriety with the inbreeding of the mandatory Club decals with the sponsor (i.e., made a separate decal for it) then I'd probably be right up there applauding the idea and gladly slapping those decals on my car when I run Nationals. But as it stands now, my hackles are raised, watching for the devil's shoe to drop, for the opportunity to say "I done tole ya so"...
GA
* Are we
really claiming one of the big advantages of this program is that someone gets the three decals for free instead of - what? - $3 each, especially when the vast majority of racers are already running the Club decals that they already had to buy...? C'mon, we can do better than that...
** I suspect this should be a separate topic. If it goes too much further I'll split these posts out.
