Quote:
Originally Posted by carbonBLUE
Race teams don't give a shit when their sponsors have millions of dollars to blow
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They don't have millions of dollars to blow, especially on low-tier racing series like Continental and Pirelli Challenge. Sponsoring low tier series has almost no ROI.
Being intimately familiar with race teams, money is a precious resource and MOST race teams are financed by the rich guy driving the car and the company he/she owns, or by the rich guy that owns the team. However big pools of sponsorship money, especially in motorsports is hard to come by and not readily wasted.
This is especially true on small potatoes series like Pirelli and Continental Challenge (Compared to NASCAR/INDY/F1). Just look at how they approach the task of finding a driver. In smaller series the majority of the drivers in those cars are paying many thousands of dollars just for the honor of driving those cars, that's partly how the teams fund things... charge the drivers to drive the cars or hire drivers that show up with their own sponsors and $$. I know this because I race with locally with some of the drivers in those series. There's usually only a small handful of teams (that usually run up front, or are "works" teams) and they actually have the coin to hire professional drivers but 85% of the rest of the grid... nope.
In fact "big sponsor dollars" is even fleeting in F1. McLaren is losing Vodafone! Why do you think Pastor Maldanado, Bruno Senna, Vitaly Petrov and Sergio Perez have/had seats in F1 cars? Because they had "enough" talent but they also showed up with 10-50 million dollars of their own money or their sponsors.
Money talks, talent walks has been the name of the game for some time now.