Sponsor woes for Champ Car?
03/23/06 Per the story we broke below back on February 10th (see below), all indications are that the Newman/Haas team indeed won't have PacifiCare back as a sponsor for Bruno Junqueira.
Junqueira appeared at Sebring testing this week with an entirely new paint scheme and no sign of PacifiCare. Now it remains to be seen whether the team has found a replacement sponsor. The new red and white paint scheme indicates something is up.
02/10/06 A reader writes, I log onto AutoRacing1.com every morning anticipating some Champ Car news and there's nothing. PKV has not filled a seat, there's no teammate announced for Tracy, what about Ryan Hunter-Reay? Are Champ Car teams this hard up for sponsorship? Brian Carroccio, Rockville, MD
Dear Brian, With all recent sponsorship announcement news by NASCAR and Grand-Am teams, the still fractured open wheel racing appears to be reeling with little or no sponsorship news to announce. IRL lost Chevy and Toyota, some teams folded and they can barely assemble a full field of cars, and likewise for Champ Car.
Tracy will probably have Dominguez as a teammate and PKV already knows who they want as drivers. As for Ryan Hunter-Reay, he sits and waits hoping for a phone call. We expect he won't know what he is doing until the 11th hour.
We hear Champ Car does have some news they are holding back on, but here is what AutoRacing1.com sources are hearing for Champ Car on the sponsorship front:
Hearing that PacifiCare is out of motorsports due to their merger with United Healthcare. Don’t know if N/H has another sponsor in the wings or not. Maybe they have a small involvement with the team for 2006 because PacifiCare is still on their website, but a PacifiCare rep told our source that due to the merger, they were out of motorsport and recently Bruno Junqueira let it slip by saying "we need a sponsor." At the time we assumed he meant for the rumored 3rd Newman/Haas car, but now we wonder.
Roshfrans has stopped all sponsorships in motorsports for 2006, except for the Champ Car official status. No sponsorship of the Forsythe team (or any others).
Hearing Intel is not going to be involved with Champ Car, in light of the Global sponsorship of the BMW F1 team.
Hearing that the CDW deal is very small, maybe only $1 million to the RuSPORT team. May not happen. This one is very speculative because CDW said they would be doing a program.
Hearing that the DHL/Glock deal is not that big of a loss to Champ Car (which is why they probably did not try to save it). There was NO buy-in (or budget) from the USA division at all, which means no activation in the USA. The budget actually came from the Deutche Post Speed Team (go to www.tolimit.de) which runs a “Driving experience" for Deutche Post. They would invite special clients to the track to drive with the Speed Team, it was basically a big Hospitality program in Europe. They broke off some of the funding from their driver development budget and put it over here. They could probably do the GP2 series for $1.5 million, where the Champ Car is going to be $3 million at least.
Hearing that in 2005, Forsythe would not take anything less than $6M, which is why Corona went away, as they only had $4million, and came on very late in the season.
Champ Car is not out of the woods yet when it comes to finding sponsors, but it's not all their fault, when Tony George split Indy Car Racing in half by creating the IRL, he basically destroyed the sport and now all the sponsors look to NASCAR. In 1995 and prior, when Joyce Julius did their annual sponsorship report, the total sponsorship value in CART dwarfed NASCAR. Look where the sport is today!
With that said, we expect Champ Car to make some key announcements Tuesday regarding the Atlantic series and then we expect to hear whatever positive news Champ Car has in their back pocket between March 1st and the Long Beach race. Mark C.