As a guest on the Belly Up Sports NASCAR podcast, Chairgatin’, Bob Leavine answered questions about NASCAR sponsors, small team struggles and much more. Bob Leavine is the team owner of the No. 95 Toyota Camry for Leavine Family Racing.
As the only Texas-based NASCAR team owner, Bob and fellow Texan, Rattlesnake, discussed the Cowboys, Texans and even Astros. In this segment of the interview however, Bob discusses the negatives of sponsorships in NASCAR as well as the promising future and also details the struggles of a small NASCAR team.
If you enjoy this informative segment of the interview, be sure to check out the full podcast interview; available on iTunes, Spotify, SoundClound and Pinecast.
Bob Leavine Interview: NASCAR Sponsors
Q: Recently, NASCAR dropped the sponsor from the Cup Series. So now, it’s just going to be the NASCAR Cup Series. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, you know the positive thoughts are it gives an opportunity for more sponsors to come and be title sponsors. But you know, I’ve been a proponent of if us cup owners have to sponsor over 50 percent of our ability to race, should we have to compete with NASCAR for sponsorship? And so, to me, it’s always been a slippery slope on them competing against us and it has really gotten a whole lot better. Let’s just say between, I think, the teams and NASCAR in the last year with Jim France and the change that is going on now, that they’re more considerate.
It used to be blatant. Once we were able to get a sponsor and a team sponsor, they would be routinely called by NASCAR about broadening their scope and being a NASCAR sponsor. And you know, to me, that’s not kosher. They don’t do that anymore. You know, they help us. And when I say anymore, I mean in the last year or so because that culture has changed and I hope it’s changing more.
Personally, I’d like say hey, give us the sponsors and let’s work that out where they can go to the team some way. And the tracks and NASCAR, they get a lot of the TV money and where one of these days it’s not so dramatic when a sponsor leaves a team that they have to – like they did with the 78 car – they have to go out of business. And that we race more for the purse that will get real close to supporting us because we just finished our ninth year, heading into our tenth and then 2020 will be our closest to ever break even. And that’s still a few million away. And to me, that’s a lot of money.
To me, it’s a whole lot of money.
We’re a blue-collar family, worked hard, saved money and we wanted to go and compete. And the thing about it is, nobody made us go to NASCAR. So, it’s not like we got to be there and we [can] leave any time we want to. But, we have made a commitment to be called one of the teams that tries to compete every year and get better every year.
And NASCAR and Mr. France and Mr. O’Donnell and Steve Phelps have recognized that. And you know, they’re trying to help us and things like us because they really believe it’s a big part of NASCAR, having the smaller teams and they’re not big mega teams. And we like to be the small team from Texas. You know, we like to be the underdog. But, we don’t want to have to continually, year after year, pay for our own races for their benefit. Really, TV’s benefit.
Small Team Struggles
Q: Something I’m sure all of us NASCAR fans have noticed is that it seems like it’s getting more difficult for the smaller teams to win races against the mega teams. What would you say is the biggest struggle I guess, just the financial part or getting sponsorship?
It’s all tied together, Matt. What you just said because it’s an old adage but dollars buy speed, money buys speed, and it really is. It’s how much testing, you know, the latest and greatest and it changes every week.
But all that to say and that’s what we’ve been planning for a couple of years now because really, we just finished our fourth full time year and I really feel good about the fact that LFR probably made the biggest move this year in final standings to where we were last year in owner points. And you know, that wasn’t where we wanted to be. We missed it by a couple spots but we did good. I’m pretty hard on grading but we really did.
But back to the, you know, the difference is well, one; only about 15 percent of drivers ever win a NASCAR race. And so, as you know and people know, the JGR organization won 19 of them last year. So that’s crazy, you know? And so, how do you win a race. Yeah, it’s tough. We were in a position in Bristol, and had a couple other shots but it was our first time really being in that position. And I think obviously, our alliance with JGR, and more so Toyota, has really upped our game. And you know, that comes with a price.
And we were willing to do that, working towards the, what’s now it’s the next gen car not the gen 7 car. But the next gen car has the potential of evening out the playing field somewhat because you know, the R&D that a lot of teams spend on it, the wind tunnels, it’s a whole lot of things that’s going to be curtailed that’s costly, now we get the benefit of Toyota doing for us. Well, we don’t have to spend it directly, we spend it indirectly by paying them. But, it’s other teams do it individually but they’re bigger teams.
So, we hitch onto a lot of the technology of Toyota and JGR that the other teams can’t do. We just have to pay into that pool to help them pay for it. And it’s the only way because we couldn’t pay our fair share, in reality, if we had to. This stuff is terribly expensive when you know, there’s wind tunneling with an ungodly number of hours spent in the wind tunnel. We can’t do that. And so, we get that. We pay for our fair share, we get results but then we have to take advantage of that results.
You have to put the cars together right. You have to stay together if you have good people, make good decisions on the track. And oh yeah, you got to have a good driver. And more so, you’ve got to be lucky.
You know, because we had some great runs at the Super Speedways. At the 500, led the most laps but got killed with eight to go. Unlucky. Two more super speedways, one I guess at Daytona again, killed. Excuse me, we finish seventh because that was the rain out. We were in seventh and that’s one of the ones where you want to finish and like gosh, we had a good car and it got rained out. Then both Talladegas, we got killed running up front. So, we have at least approached the threshold of probability of winning, if that makes sense.
If you enjoyed this informative segment of the interview, be sure to check out the full podcast interview; available on iTunes, Spotify, SoundClound and Pinecast.
