The Ripple Effect of U.S. Regulations on Motorsports

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Brake Fix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

Crew Chief Eric: Economic Engines, the Unexpected Consequences of U. S. Regulatory Changes on Motorsports, by Quinn Beekwilder.

Professor Buechwilder’s passion for motorsport history drives him to design courses that highlight the historical development and societal impact of motorsports. His innovative approach includes experimental activities that blend theoretical knowledge with practical experience. In this presentation, Professor Buechwilder explores the unintended benefits of government regulations on motorsports, particularly how laws curbing tobacco advertising and the sale of alcohol led to significant growth of racing in the United States.

Quinn Beekwilder is the assistant professor and coordinator of the motorsports management degree at Belmont Abbey College. With a decade of experience at Charlotte Motor Speedway. And as one of the program’s first graduates, he brings [00:01:00] invaluable industry insights and addresses student concerns effectively.

Quinn Beekwilder: Thank you very much for having me back again here in Watkins Glen. Love coming back. On occasion, I find myself in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. I take my motorsport history class there after we do our NASCAR history segment in the class. And it’s always a fantastic time. One of the things I noticed going through in part of their marketing structure, even part of the museum itself, is before there was speed, there was shine.

There’s not really a shiny car being represented in there. There’s a bottle of alcohol. That got me thinking. It was like, oh, okay. So why was there shine before speed? What was the cause of this? And even in the NASCAR Hall of Fame, there are tales of Junior Johnson, who I got to know on occasion working with the Speedway.

There’s a display in the NASCAR Hall of Fame that is a still itself. So it’s a moonshine still, it’s set up. At first, Junior Johnson, they had approached him and said, Hey, we want to do a section that has a moonshine still in it. Can you contribute anything? And he said, Hold one sec. [00:02:00] And he went ahead and built a still.

He built a still and he sent it to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. And he said, okay, here you go. And they sort of turned around and they looked at him and said, how do we put it together? And he said, hold on. And so he came down and he assembled the thing himself. And to this day it’s said that he claims that if as long as you light a fire under it and put the right ingredients in, it will produce alcohol at the other end.

Fully functional still is what he delivered, per his knowledge of the product and his history with it. From this, before there was Speed, there was Shine, there also kind of comes about this era of the Winston Cup series. It was with us for 30 odd years. And why was the Winston part of NASCAR? There’s two regulatory changes that I’m going to be talking about.

Prohibition under the 18th Amendment and the 1970 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act. And these two changes basically kind of posit that they were the reason that NASCAR was created. And the second one was how it was maintained and IMSA benefited from it as well during this time period. So let’s get into it.[00:03:00]

Bootlegging and prohibition. The 18th amendment is ratified in 1920, and that makes it basically illegal for all alcohol to be sold, to be distributed, to be produced. Well, Americans like their alcohol, and even though it had become illegal, there was quite a need and want for alcohol. There were plenty of folks up in the mountains and foothills of North Carolina and Georgia and parts of the South that were willing to fulfill this need.

They had already been producing alcohol on their own, typically on a small batch scale type. But once the nation was deprived of alcohol, their operations ramped up to quite a large level. And so, most of these hidden distilleries require wood, fire, heat, and time to produce alcohol. And typically the smoke would be rising up, so revenuers or sheriffs were able to see this smoke and sort of pick out where hidden distilleries were.

And so the majority of the time the production would take place at night or under the light of the moon is kind of where we get this whole term of moonshine from. And so, once you actually create this [00:04:00] product, and it’s sitting there up in the mountains, and the thirsty folks down in Atlanta would really like their alcohol, you need to get it from point A to point B.

And so, the original impetus, horse carts, large trucks, Model Ts, Model As, all recruited into this operation. And how initially it starts to kind of come down from the foothills to the cities. But it was being noticed that more and more of these are easily intercepted. They were caught. So they needed to develop a much faster way of avoiding law enforcement.

That really kind of leads into this whole modification program. Cars and vehicles start to be modified. to become faster and faster. Raymond Parks was initially a bootlegger himself who earned enough money to open up his own garage and along with Red Voight, car mechanic who’d become quite influential in NASCAR later on, they would modify these vehicles for bootleggers and police officers alike.

Typically, it was said that the bootleggers got the better engines because they actually paid in cash and up front. Whereas the sheriff’s [00:05:00] departments had to wait for the government checks to clear. And so, you know, they got the lesser capable vehicles. There ends up this whole entire cat and mouse happening from the foothills down.

Where the faster you could go, the more you could avoid law enforcement, and the quicker you could get paid. And so nightly runs would be taking place between Dawsonville and North Wilkesboro down to the Atlanta area to supply this alcohol. Also, it had to be handled in such a way that it wouldn’t, End up with a bunch of broken glass all over the back of your car.

And so right before prohibition kind of comes to a close, the Ford V8 is introduced and the Ford V8 kind of changes the game for everyone. I’ll just go ahead and read this quote. The balance design created more torque, more horsepower, and more stability at high speeds. The V8 beast and the coupe that it powered seemed tailor made for bootlegging.

Incredibly, a V8 coupe seemed to handle more nimbly the faster it went. In the South, powerful V8s left many sheriff’s deputies in the dust. And once Whiskey Mechanics added extra carburetors to the engine and heavy tires and stronger suspension to the chassis, a Ford V8 could fly at 100 miles per hour across jagged mountain [00:06:00] roads.

And I really don’t think that last statement is hyperbole. They pretty much were flying at around 100 miles per hour in the dark, over mountain roads that weren’t designed. To really handle very aggressive driving, they were rutted, they were pit, they were dirt roads. And with these challenging conditions, develops this talent.

The ones that actually get it, the ones that understand how to maneuver through it, and use speed to their advantage, start to develop this talent of driving skills that they all of a sudden want to put to the test to other bootleggers. And so, casually, you have this development of bootleggers kind of getting together and racing and competing amongst themselves.

And casually, a few people might show up. And some farmers who have some open fields and land say, You know what? Let’s go ahead and plow some space. I want to watch this too. More people show up. Promoters start coming out of the woodwork. They start noticing that people are showing up at farmers fields.

So they might show up to a horse track or to a fairground. And then a lot of these promoters were also of the unscrupulous nature. And so midway through a race, you could end up [00:07:00] winning the event, but not having any money because the promoter took off with the ticket sales midway through. And so this is kind of the environment of the later 1930s, early 40s that is going on.

And even though Prohibition has ended at this point, there was such a blanketing of distilleries, breweries, everything is just shut down, but the stills are still up and running. So they can still provide, before big industry can kind of come and take its place, the stills are still providing plenty of alcohol for the South, that bootlegging kind of continues on even past the end of Prohibition.

And this is the time period too where Bill France starts out with his promotional ventures. Prior to the 1938 In 36 and 37, the AAA and the Elks Club had both run stock car races in Daytona to failure, but Bill France had seen success in both his 38 and 39 series that he ran, and stock car racing was developing more and more because prior to this, motorsports had really been kind of straight line racing.

So from 1903 up until [00:08:00] 1935, Daytona Beach was known as Land speed record territory. That’s where Sir Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebird finally set, I think, the last speed record in 35 was 276 miles per hour on average. So these were incredible speeds, but they had reached their limit. The sand could no longer hold it.

The speed trial folks picked up everything and then went for longer, more flatter, more solid grounds, and they found the Bonneville Salt Flats. And so that’s why Bonneville Salt Flats, after this point, start picking up and having all the speed trials. But the South is left with this kind of hole, but stock car racing is kind of filling this void.

And then Lakewood Speedway, or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway of the South, right outside of Atlanta, holds its largest race in 1938 on Armistice Day, with over 20, 000 fans showing up. So there’s this want and need for large scale events in stock car racing. You know, we’re starting to enter the 1940s.

World War II would come in the way as well, but there were so many racing organizations that were out at this point. Some of these organizations, I’ll read off some of their names, and you probably may never have heard of them. Champion Stock Car Club, the Stock Car Racing Association, [00:09:00] New England Stock Car Association, National Stock Car Racing Association, and more and more.

There was this want and need by drivers. They wanted a legitimate, competitive, and rewarding series. But they were so fragmented with one coming up and one going away, appearing and disappearing over a season. This is the territory that Bill France kind of steps into. His vision was really, he founded in 1947 the National Championship Stock Car Circuit, or NCSCC.

This is really the precursor to NASCAR itself. One of the novel features that he introduced was also rewarding drivers post season. So actually, for competing through and earning points throughout the season, you could win a championship and receive a check afterwards. Most promoters and most series creators at this time period were just paying out at the race itself.

And so paying out for a championship in the end was kind of like, why are you doing that? Drivers appreciated that. They also appreciated knowing how much they would be winning to have an established point system. Win so many points, earn so many dollars. That’s kind of the quote from Bill France at the top I have, is we started [00:10:00] this championship stock car racing organization because it was needed.

If the drivers and race teams follow this racing circuit, we as a group can become a stronger unit. And so this kind of lays the groundwork. This lays this trust, you know, that starts to build over the season. So he’d go on to complete about 40 odd races during this 1947. Bonty Flock would be declared the champion.

The Flock family would be one of the first families in NASCAR. So he rides this momentum in 1947. And in December, he calls a meeting at the Streamline Hotel, along with Bill Tuttle, who was a promoter from the New York area that he’d worked with earlier that season. And they grow out a lot of the racing representatives from.

The South and the North to kind of come together to form this new unified series. France truly believed that nothing stands still right here within our own group, rests the outcome of stock car racing in this country today. A lot of the folks in the room may not have believed him because there had been so many series.

That had come and gone, that they may have just come down for a weekend of drinks and food and have a good time and sign on to a dotted [00:11:00] line and say, Okay, sure, let’s start a new racing organization and not thought much about it. Bill France was the only candidate for president at the time and everyone duly voted him in without objection, but later on they kind of say, Were we bamboozled?

Why is he the president? This would lead later on to, you know, some controversies. But at the time, they decided to call themselves the National Stock Car Racing Association. Red Voight, though, had pointed out that it was already taken. So he suggested the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.

Since one name had already been taken, they decided, yep, okay, we’ll go ahead and take this. And NASCAR is created at that point. Kind of go back to the domino scenario. The need for illegal alcohol to be transported to other areas creates the need for bootleggers, who develop skills, who then want to compete.

The more and more they compete, they want more legitimacy themselves, leading to sanctioning bodies being created and falling away, and then NASCAR to kind of come out of the woodwork to kind of stand on top of the rest. So, that’s why I think that without prohibition, there couldn’t have been NASCAR. And the next regulatory issue that I want to [00:12:00] talk about was really the 1970 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act.

It was an attack by the U. S. government to prevent advertising on television and radio of cigarette ads. Now you might not think that that’s that big of a deal, one or two ads here and there. It’s an adult’s decision whether or not to pick up cigarettes and start smoking. Well, they were spending roughly 80 percent of their entire budget of the cigarette industry as a whole was being spent on TV ads.

Spending only 150 million dollars doesn’t sound like much, but if you adjust for inflation, this is over a billion dollars in advertising on television alone. And then if we go back even further, because we’re so used to cable television streaming networks, there were only three major networks. It was ABC, NBC, and CBS.

And so three television stations had a billion dollars worth of cigarette advertising on them throughout the year. That’s a lot of cigarette advertising. And then even some of these ads I pulled, it was of the vein of more doctors smoke camels and also the Flintstones basically go through and astound the benefits of smoking smooth, filtered Winston cigarettes.

[00:13:00] So, you know, when you have major cartoon characters telling you to smoke cigarettes. Maybe we’ve reached a point. With this being said, the bill is signed into law April of 1970. And it actually goes into effect January 2nd of 1971, just in time for the NASCAR season. Since the writing was kind of on the wall, the bill had been signed by Nixon.

Junior Johnson steps back into the picture. This time, a lot of the major car manufacturers were starting to step away. Ford, Dodge, Chrysler. A lot of their major factory teams were kind of set back. Some of the engineering support was being pulled away. And so it was leaving this hole of finance. And so Junior Johnson said, well, you know what?

I’m gonna go approach R. J. Reynolds. They’re just up the road. They’re based in Winston Salem, North Carolina. And Junior was around the Charlotte area. And so he just took the hour and a half drive up, proposed that, how about R. J. Reynolds pays me 200, 000 for sponsorship? That sounds good. Keep my team going.

And they basically turned to him and said, well, what can you do with several million dollars? And he said, sponsorship doesn’t usually work that way. You ask me for one amount, and you 10, 10 million times they get back [00:14:00] to me. I’m not used to this. After he gets over the initial shock, he realizes that even with that amount of money, he wouldn’t be able to do it justice.

He wouldn’t be able to do what RJ Reynolds wanted to do. And so he introduced RJ Reynolds, Ralph Seagraves, who would go on to manage the majority of this promotion and oversee it really. And Bill Franz, Jr. So after multiple meetings, they came out and the first ever title sponsorship for NASCAR is created.

The NASCAR Wins and Cup Series. This new standard for commercial partnership in motorsports is kind of founded because tobacco needed to move their money out of TV and into something else. That next year’s spending of a billion dollars was already slated, and so they needed to put it somewhere. NASCAR seemed to fit the bill.

With this, they redirect the majority of their budgets, but they also redirect a huge majority of their expertise. NASCAR at this point was a regional sport, had some national attention here and there. It was talked about, but it really didn’t have much television coverage. Didn’t have much press coverage and wasn’t known outside of the South to a great extent.

And so [00:15:00] Winston basically all of a sudden brings, almost takes. NASCAR out of the Model T and puts it in the Ford V8 and just sends it down the road. And they start rocketing down with billboards and media coverage. And the thing called a press conference. Actually making drivers available for media interactions through telephone calls.

Flying media in from major organizations to a race to actually cover said race. They pay for track improvement. They tell them to move their award banquet basically to the New York City’s Waldorf Astoria. Anything at this point that happens in New York is in national news. They also direct their sport marketing enterprise to become the unofficial PR hub for NASCAR.

So they take it pretty much away from the one guy who might have been talking to the press after the race, to all of a sudden a New York PR group that is now promoting everything about NASCAR. Along with this, there do come some challenges. RJ Reynolds is really looking to nationalize NASCAR looking to see how they can take this regional series and make it nationally recognizable and to make our investment [00:16:00] worthwhile so that we get the most exposure in front of the United States as we can.

As opposed to what they used to get with paying roughly a billion a year for TV coverage. They suggest different improvements. Racing schedules reduced dramatically from 48 races down to about 31 races within a year. A lot of the smaller venues, 150 mile races, 200 mile races are all replaced. 400, 500 mile races are taking place.

The idea of high profile events are introduced to get people really excited on a national level. The Winston Million, the Winston or the All Star race. are introduced during this time period as well. So the Winston Million was basically a promotional idea. It’s like, how can we get more people entertained or engaged with NASCAR racing?

Well, what if we give a million dollars to the one driver who wins three of the four hardest races? Okay, sure. You know, is that possible? And most officials and most drivers are like, nah, it’s not possible. Okay. Well, that sounds like an even better bet. We can say we’re going to give them a million dollars.

And if no one wins it, then fantastic. Perfect. And so what are these races? Okay. It’s going to be the Daytona 500. [00:17:00] It’s going to be Talladega. It’s going to be a Charlotte 600 and it’s going to be Darlington. Wouldn’t you know it? They didn’t take out really any liability type insurance or contest insurance on this thing.

And Bill Elliot wins it in the first year. Lo and behold, the impossible happens. And so they’re on the hook for the full million. You know, there wasn’t any insurance companies involved that prized indemnification or anything of that nature. But yeah, that was the very first year that they introduced the program, Billy Elliot wins it, and they sure indemnified that thing afterwards.

But it wouldn’t be until 1997, where a fresh faced Jeff Gordon would actually win the final Winston Million. That’s a long time to go without having winners. It did make sense when they initially did it, but they’re like, shoot, you got to pay this. So lessons learned, but it did capture the national attention.

So, I mean, you know, we, even to this day, you know, you know, famous awesome bill from Dawsonville comes out of the woodwork every now and then with this, they invest millions in the tracks to improve grandstands. They actually, they were known to have saved several tracks from bankruptcy, paying off some bills, red and white paint all of a sudden becomes the normal paint for all these race facilities.[00:18:00]

Winston was painted every hundred yards down the backstretch stripes to induce when they actually got on TV. So the stripes would look faster as the cars are moving. You know, is this whole kind of mindset of raising the bar. All these improvements that go along, more people are coming out watching these events.

Television is catching on. So they go from having just recorded segments. On worldwide sport to having the start of the race to the end of the race. Cutting in to finally CBS taking the leap in 1979 for the first flag to flag broadcast, I have coverage. The Daytona 500, which ended in a very dramatic finish, a fight happening in the back stretch.

This all happened in front of millions of people. Because there coincidentally happened to be a blizzard that limited everyone’s ability to leave their house and they’re stuck around the TV. And again, there are only three TV stations to choose from. And if your choices are one, two or three, and one of those has a race on, you’re going to watch the thing with the race.

That viewership record actually wasn’t broken until about the 2010s. So that was a phenomenal catch for NASCAR with this 1979 [00:19:00] race to entice so many people to become interested in the series itself. And with Winston’s investment into the series, they’re said to have invested around 60 million annually.

With inflation, of course, that number grows quite exponentially, so it’s a lot of multiple millions of dollars being invested in to tracks, to personnel, but it gave a steady base that they could operate off of. And the prize money, as you can see, rapidly increased in a fairly short amount of time. 1964, if you won the 500, the prize pool itself was only 100, 000.

By 74, it was 250, 000. By 79, it was 538, 000. And by 85, it was well over a million dollars. So prize pools started to increase drastically. With this long term investment that Winston had made into the sport was just paying off and drivers were starting to reap the benefits of it and also on a national scale being established as the premier stock car racing organization that it is today.

Not to be outdone, but around the same time period, IMSA benefits from this as well. So, a brief recap [00:20:00] of IMSA’s creation. John Bishop had worked with the SEC in parted ways. Bill France had considered starting a new sports car sanctioning body, and he called up John Bishop. He said, why don’t you come down to Daytona?

Let’s talk about it. I’d hate for your experience to go to waste. And once they got together and they talked and Bill France said, I’ll make a large mutual investment. Let’s get this off the ground and running. So the International Motorsports Association was founded in 1969 with its first emphasis on Formula Fords and Formula Vs.

Bill France ended up owning 75 percent initially of IMSA. That was paid off by John Bishop by 1976 or so. He had paid off all of France’s investments. And so he owned it himself, but the initial IMSA suffered from a lot of bad press, some accidents, and only 500 people showing up to Talladega. Which would be really awkward to see only 500 people at a race at Talladega.

With that being said, there was a refocus on sports cars. So by 1970, the Formula Vs and Formula Fords kind of were pulled a little bit back, and sports cars were going to be the next big thing. Now, this was not actually [00:21:00] a Bill France introducing R. J. Reynolds. to John Bishop. This was kind of just a natural progression.

I couldn’t really find any proof that one introduced the other, but it happened to be R. J. Reynolds as well and through their Camel brand. And through their Camel brand in 1972, Camel comes in and basically provides that critical funding that IMSA needed to really gain eyeballs on the racetrack. And so there’s a very quick growth and all of a sudden credibility.

If I said IMSA GT, and it’s a series that started last year, what’s that? But if you say Camel GT, it’s like, well, I know Camel cigarettes, and they’re behind it. Well, it must be something. So let me at least take a look at it. Just through that, the race calendars open up, more tracks kind of open up, and it will accept an IMSA race to appear.

Top talent comes out of the woodworks. The manufacturers come out once the Camel GTP prototype classes come out from Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan, Toyota, Lola, Lotus. So many manufacturers kind of come out of the woodwork. So all the different classes that are introduced throughout the 70s and 80s, they just kind of ride this wave.

With that being said, there is [00:22:00] this whole idea that the public needs protecting from cigarettes. That was the original policy attempt, to take eyeballs off cigarettes and take it off television. It had the unintended consequence of shifting everything to motorsports. Something that was in front of people’s eyeballs already, and through the influx of cash from these companies, got in front of even more eyeballs, and just spread itself out even more across the country than it had originally even been intended to.

Yep. They basically created this symbiotic relationship where the success of one proved the success of the other. With the funds and the advertising, dragged motorsports along with it, it got better cars, it got better talent, it got better racing, it just became a better sporting organization through IMSA and through NASCAR itself, and you had a better product to put out on the track.

And really, that’s kind of what I wanted to say. Thank you.

Kip Zeiter: When did this all end? [00:23:00] A year or two that this all actually ended?

Quinn Beekwilder: Right around 1998, there was another act that basically came into vault, basically prevented cigarette advertising and sporting events. And so that’s when a lot of this kind of went away. Camel cigarettes kind of dipped out around 93, 94 or so.

So they were a little bit earlier. And then Winston was until about 2003 that they left. It was basically another government regulation that kind of stepped in and said, No, you can’t have this giant platform to advertise on. Which they kind of caused in the first place.

Audience: Did any of the bootleggers turn into major alcohol manufacturers?

You mentioned that the large corporations eventually took that business away from them. But did they themselves develop into a major corporation?

Quinn Beekwilder: The type of alcohol that was produced was of Very strong, referred to as white lightning. Funny you should mention, Junior Johnson actually had his own brand, Midnight Moon.

He launched himself and basically made legal moonshine and then packaged and paid the tax stamp on later in life. And so it [00:24:00] kind of took his historical connections to it and just used it as a marketing ploy. But it was still just a straight in a mason jar,

Audience: though. He never tried to develop. No, no, he went on,

Quinn Beekwilder: well, his father was known to have been the largest east coast bust of moonshine on record at the time when his family farm was impounded and all the alcohol was taken out.

He himself was arrested for distilling and spent a year and a half or so in federal penitentiary, which Ronald Reagan actually years later pardoned him for. Got that off his record later on, but no, that was about the only one that I kind of went and kind of wrote it on out. Most of them kind of got out of the business or passed away because of it.

Audience: I’m curious how your presentation interfaces with the first one we saw this morning about the Winston cup West and what that kind of transition from a Southern sport to a national sport looked like under Winston sponsorship.

Quinn Beekwilder: My main focus was more on the national level. So I was actually really intrigued by Dan’s presentation this morning of the Winston West series itself.

But I believe that with Winston’s money, there was able to be a. Secondary Western series, you know, you had the development [00:25:00] of sub series below NASCAR itself to be a feeder into the main series later on. And you have much more insight since your family was involved in it.

Audience: They certainly spent more money and they wanted to boost the West Coast series, so they allotted X amount of dollars.

Yeah,

Quinn Beekwilder: that’s perfectly fine because like I said, mine was strictly research on the national level and not subcategory.

Ken Yohn: So in the late 1950s, there was a Robert Mitchum film, Thunder Road, about moonshiners and bootleggers. I was wondering if you knew anything or anybody had any speculation about how that would impact NASCAR, because it was, for a lot of America, it was an introduction to Appalachian culture.

And there was a whole different side of America’s social structure that was popularized by that film.

Quinn Beekwilder: Yeah, and actually NASCAR, even at its very beginnings, once in the Late forties, early fifties, never really wanted to be associated with bootlegging. So in its original emphasis, when it was trying to make a name for itself and [00:26:00] become popular before Winston stepped in, they pretty much denied that there were any kind of criminal activities or anything that kind of inspired this was all the France’s idea.

And, you know, they all came together in the spirit of competition to make this series and, you know, become legal and legitimate, you know, and clean as a whistle basically. And so it wasn’t until mid two thousands or, you know, 2010s, this acceptance Okay, fine. It did happen. A lot of these bootleggers, a lot of the technology that kind of went into it, the skills learned on the back roads, going into the dirt tracks, going into the major racing events, the families that got their start from that Raymond parks was one of the first multi car team owners at the very start of NASCAR.

All his money came from slot machines, gambling and running alcohol into Atlanta. And that’s another reason that Charlotte became a hub for NASCAR is that Atlanta and their. The rich people of Atlanta and the religious leaders of Atlanta didn’t want criminality associated and running on Sundays. And so they basically forced a lot of the local government plus the police to arrest these drivers because they knew they’re racing at [00:27:00] Lakewood.

They knew they were going to be there. You know, they were kind of just snubbing their nose at society and they wouldn’t stand for it. But Charlotte was like, Come on down. They were fine with it. You know, so that’s kind of why I don’t have Atlanta as the kind of like the hub for NASCAR as opposed to Charlotte.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, Quinn, our very active live streamers. First of all, Mark Howell said, stop dealing with thunder. Ash Vandalay writes, We see constant complaints online that NASCAR isn’t like it used to be. Would we say that’s because of the lack of money to pump into various marketing efforts or maybe an accumulation of things?

Quinn Beekwilder: Yeah, I’d say it’s a accumulation of things. This is my opinion. With the rise of NASCAR, it was throughout the 70s and even into the early 2000s. And then all of a sudden we see this kind of switch over. Nextel Cup, all of a sudden tech is involved. And they become the series sponsor, which then switches into Sprint because of a buyout.

The early 2000s, Ots and of the two thousands see this enormous influx. It’s almost like everyone’s tripping over themselves to invest tens of millions of dollars in [00:28:00] sponsorship money into these races. It seemed to have almost been worked up to a fever pitch and then everyone started investing and then 2008 hit.

And everyone stops investing pullbacks on sponsorships. You go from full seasons, having the exact same car sponsored by Home Depot and Lowe’s and M& Ms and, you know, authentics is one of the last remaining ones right now, but you know, the single company sponsors for an entire season just seemed to disappear overnight facilities that had constantly relied on.

Full seats and huge waiting lists to get into the Bristol night race just all of a sudden vanished. And there were tickets available, whereas for years they’ve been just, you know, waiting lists and season ticket holders only. There’s been an adjustment. I mean, there’s been ups and downs in every sport.

We’re correcting back out, but to a more sustainable where we’re at right now in NASCAR, but what the future holds, we’ll see.

Lyn St. James: I think it is a fascinating business story of how this is all evolved, but have you been to the NASCAR R and D center?

Quinn Beekwilder: I’ve been down once or twice. Inside. Yeah, inside.

Lyn St. James: [00:29:00] After you get past the front desk area off to the right, that large room.

Quinn Beekwilder: Yeah.

Lyn St. James: That sign that’s on, have you seen what’s literally written on the wall?

Quinn Beekwilder: Okay, I’ve missed that one.

Lyn St. James: It’s a quote from Bill France at the meeting in the formation of NASCAR. Yeah. It makes reference to, we can do the same thing, but better than those is. Guys in Indianapolis, that that was like a driving, motivating force.

And I don’t know how accurate that is, but it’s up on the wall at the R& D center, so I think it’s probably true.

Quinn Beekwilder: So that does take a little bit away from, you know, I was trying to structure it more towards like prohibition, but yes, there was a big influx fight, there have been tales and how true they are or not of the.

Bill France being at Indianapolis or so. AAA, the sanctioning body, kind of finding out that he was even in the garages and going, Oh, he’s not supposed to be here and kicking him out. Even at times he had tried to approach them or even had considered kind of teaming up to like, Hey, AAA, you’ve got this experience.

How about I come in as your stock car representative? And we kind of run this stock car series together. And just AAA was having. None of it. They just kind of [00:30:00] thumbed their noses at it. They just basically like a third rate racing series for the working class is basically how they thought of stock car racing.

Eventually they would turn around and start trying their own stock car racing series once they saw that something was occurring and happening after France had established NASCAR. It was too little too late. Bill was Very authoritative of if you went to another series, you lost your points, blackballed and not accepted back.

And there are all sorts of consequences. They stuck to pretty firmly. We ruled NASCAR quite with an iron fist in one hand. If you hadn’t have, I don’t think it would have, if it was up there, I

Lyn St. James: figured it had to be at least an accurate quote in a driving force. And then my only little comment was. When it was the Camel Series, and I just remember I was going to Brainerd to race in the IMSA race there, and I was supposed to go to the media center, and I was late.

I got in a rental car, I was in this little escort with my foot totally to the floor trying to get there in time. You know, just could imagine in a rental car just hauling butt, and all of a sudden I look up and I see this huge billboard, Camel GT, where a man belongs. And all of a sudden, I was like, what the hell am I working so hard to get there for?

[00:31:00] This is so funny. The other was that, you know how with Marlboro, with their sponsorship, when they got pulled because of the law, right? But then I think Penske kept the color scheme so that you really didn’t even miss that Marlboro wasn’t on there. I mean, it’s just interesting visually how the identification can carry forward even if the letters aren’t there.

Quinn Beekwilder: Welcome back to 2026, or 2023. European regulation little forefront, but yes, mission winnow is also one of those fun things that we’re going to be talking about, but that goes back to a nonsensical, what is it type company that’s sort of funded by, and it’s just a, the shape of it at speed looks like a Marlboro pack.

It’s kind of fun.

Crew Chief Eric: Mark Howe writes, how much has the use of wraps promoted slash enabled the rash of one off sponsors?

Quinn Beekwilder: Gosh, it’s really helped. But I think it’s also helped to the extent of a really good boon to the industry, because for example, Coca Cola has many variations of Coca Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, Pumpkin Coke, I’m sure will come out someday.

Oreos and Coke came out not that long ago, which is disgusting. But regardless of that, these single car [00:32:00] wraps can be utilized to promote. Every single product line that a major corporation might have. So it’s quite nice that this technology exists if you do pitch a corporation. Not only is it Coca Cola being sold, but you can go ahead and weekly switch out to your next product line or your next marketing innovation.

That you want to promote to the nation and you can make it even regional. If you had a particular product that sells better in one spot or the other, you know, if you had a conglomerate of supermarkets, I mean, you know, you could change it out from what area you’re in, which is that particular supermarket or convenience store that you might be sponsored by in that effect.

I, you know, I do think it’s a quite nice to have.

Rick Hughey: It wasn’t just cigarettes. It was chewing tobacco. Copenhagen and Skoll were major players in NASCAR and IndyCar. They had the Skoll Motorsports Report that was coast to coast on radio. Good old Skoll Bandit. Yep. Yep. Affect a lot of different things.

Quinn Beekwilder: Yeah, that was very true.

Yeah. On the team level, there were many more brands that kind of got involved, but I think Winston with its exclusivity as a top sponsor [00:33:00] squashed a lot of the smaller companies from being able to kind of do the single car sponsorships up.

Kip Zeiter: Quinn, that was terrific. Thank you very much.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center.

Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The Center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world. The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events.

To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives. org. This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers. organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard, as well as to [00:34:00] broaden and deepen the understanding of motorized, wheeled land transportation through the modern age and into the future.

For more information about the SAH, visit www. autohistory. org.

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Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction and Sponsorship
• 00:23 Professor Beekwilder’s Background
• 03:00 The Impact of Prohibition on Motorsports
• 07:30 The Rise of NASCAR
• 11:57 The Influence of Tobacco Sponsorship
• 19:54 IMSA and the Camel GT Series
• 27:22 Modern NASCAR and Sponsorship Changes
• 33:05 Conclusion and Q&A

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