The era of associating 1 NASCAR driver with a particular sponsor is over

The departure of Lowe’s closes the door on the era of NASCAR when a driver was closely associated with a single company, for better or worse.

Not that long ago, I was pleased to receive the two NASCAR hats I had ordered for this season in the mail. One was a Credit One Bank hat to support Kyle Larson, and the other was a Menards hat. My son, already a pretty savvy racing fan at age nine, questioned me to make sure it was for Ryan Blaney and not Paul Menard, a valid query unless you see the 12 and Blaney’s facsimile signature embroidered on the back.

The reason for this uncertainty is that Menards is actually sponsoring both drivers this year in certain races. Similar arrangements can be found with Axalta (William Byron and Alex Bowman) and Haas Automation (Clint Bowyer and Kurt Busch), just to name a few off the top of the head. The sponsors in those cases have deals that have to do with the teams more than the drivers, so they swap back and forth for different races.

There are still a few drivers like Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch who have nearly all of their races covered by the same primary sponsor, and Joey Logano is pretty close to that status as well. But there was just one driver, Jimmie Johnson, who raced his entire career with the same company on the hood of his car every race.

As we found out this week, that won’t be the case in 2019, as Lowe’s is leaving the sport at the end of the season. In a refrain all too common among big companies these days, it’s not that Lowe’s is disappointed with Johnson, it just questions whether it should be involved sponsoring a NASCAR team at all.

For Hendrick Motorsports, it’s a problem the team would rather not have to face, trying to piece together sponsorship for the most accomplished stock car racer of his era as he competes in his final two seasons. And that’s exactly what will probably have to happen, because as even bright young stars like Ryan Blaney are finding out, any new business NASCAR teams are finding with companies willing to serve as primary sponsors is going to be for three races much more often than 36.

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It’s going to take someone with a lot more knowledge of marketing than this writer and race fan, but while it is undoubtedly much cheaper to put your name on the hood for just a few outings, potential sponsors lose what the sport has had for much of the last few decades: the car, sponsor and driver all being thought of or spoken of in the same breath. Yes, drivers did switch sponsors during the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, but it was generally for seasons at a time, not a week to week basis.

If you grew up a NASCAR fan during that era, you immediately could play word association between star and driver without hesitation. Dale Earnhardt was GM Goodwrench, while Dale Jr, for years meant Budweiser. Mark Martin was Valvoline (and later Viagra). Terry Labonte drove the Kellogg’s car, Jeff Gordon and the Rainbow Warriors sported the DuPont colors, and Johnson always, always meant Lowe’s, fighting a home improvement battle of sorts with Tony Stewart and Home Depot.

Incredibly, except for Axalta, which is more or less an evolved version of DuPont formed by mergers and acquisitions, all of those companies are out of the NASCAR sponsorship game altogether save for the occasional one-off deal here and there. What remains is no longer so much of a shared identity of driver and sponsor, but more of a marriage of economic convenience.

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That’s not a good or bad thing, necessarily, just a reflection of how things are in the sport in 2018. Someone will certainly see the value in sponsoring Johnson, or rather, more than one someone. You won’t think of him and Lowe’s as an inseparable racing venture or will you think of any other driver that way, probably, as NASCAR heads into the next decade. And that means you’ll probably always have to check the back of the cap as well as the front, just to make sure.