Building Toward a Factory Ride

A factory ride is the dream behind a lot of grassroots programs: a manufacturer's truck or car, a paid seat, a team behind you. It's worth understanding why those teams exist before chasing one. Manufacturers build vehicles that have to survive conditions no warehouse can reproduce, like a thousand miles of desert. A factory team tests parts in the field, and what works best can move onto the production line. That's the R&D reason. The rest of the reason is sales, and that part decides who gets the seat.

Factory teams are built to sell, not just to race

Travis Clarke, executive vice president of action sports and Olympics at Wasserman, helped put Polaris Factory Racing together. He told my Off-Road Sponsorship Summit that the request from Polaris was refreshingly honest: "We know we want to build the cars, we know we ultimately want to sell these cars, but we know we need to hire people who know how to prep and manage them. We know we need to hire drivers, and we don't want to pay for the whole thing. So how can this work?"

His answer was to follow the customer. Someone buying a Polaris often finances it, so the finance company was a natural partner. A financed vehicle needs insurance, so an insurer came next. Then came the upgrades buyers add, like wheels, tires and lights. "The days of logos on race cars are gone. You got to figure out ways to deliver value," Clarke said. The best value is sales: "If you can just bypass some of that middle ground and go straight to sales, that's a B2B play." For tire and wheel partners whose products aren't offered on a stock Polaris, the factory program meant "total incremental business growth." ▶ Watch the factory team session

The lesson for a racer is that a factory program is a business plan with a race schedule attached. The drivers who fit are the ones who help the plan work.

Clear the car before you need it

I asked Clarke what an amateur who is winning should do first if he wants to build toward a factory deal. His answer surprised a lot of people: "Take off all the stickers that aren't giving you any value." If a company isn't paying you or giving you substantial product, its decal works against you, he said, "because when a brand sees stickers on a race car, they think that you've got some sort of relationship with them." A wheel company scouting for a young driver may never call if it sees a competitor's logo you're running for a 10 percent discount. "You really got to show that you're looking for opportunity, and it's hard to do when you're littered with stickers." ▶ Watch the clip

He told the story of desert racer Andy McMillin coming back after a break. Clarke had him strip the livery, and McMillin showed up with a mostly black truck and won the race in it.

Your first pitch is your audition as a marketer

Factory programs get flooded with résumés and race results. Clarke's advice for getting noticed is to treat the approach itself as a sample of your work. "You've got to think like a marketer," he said. The way a brand receives your résumé or phone call is its first impression of what you'll do for it, "so be creative." He has received a phone in the mail that started ringing as soon as FedEx got a signature. The point isn't the gimmick. It's that "if you're going to be an effective brand ambassador, oftentimes you got to think like a marketer," and a young racer with no track record can prove that in a single cold call. ▶ Watch Travis Clarke explain

Big brands have a ladder, and you climb it off the track

Jason DiFuccia, now CMO of K&N, ran marketing for Polaris's RZR line before that. He told the same session that the flashy stuff can get attention, but what keeps it is honesty about what you're good at. And he explained how racers move up. "The bigger brands, the Polarises and those type of things, they have lots of levels of athlete sponsorships. If you come in and you make it easy for a brand to work with you, and you commit and then overdeliver, you're going to climb that ladder in terms of the level of sponsorship. You're going to climb that ladder pretty quick."

The climb depends less on results than racers think. "It's as much about who you are off the track as it is what your results are on the track," DiFuccia said. "Your value to us as a brand is far, far more. It's at least 50/50, if not more, so what you do between races and off the track as to what you're doing on the track." ▶ Watch Jason DiFuccia on climbing the ladder

He added that brands check before they ever return a call. "The folks at the brands, they do their homework before they make that call back. They'll be looking at social, they'll be looking at content." And when the call does come: "It's because they have something in mind, and just be open to what that is." ▶ See the full answer

Get recommended, then make yourself useful

Two stories from a PRI Show panel show how racers actually move up. Kyle Kietzmann of BELL Racing explained how sprint car driver Carson Macedo became a BELL athlete. Two-time World of Outlaws champion Jason Meyers brought him to the booth and said, "I'm working with this young man. I think a lot of him, I think highly of him. And I think he would be a great representative of your brand." BELL signed him "based on Jason's recommendation, because ultimately, we want to work with good people who are going to influence other racers to buy our products."

Bill Tichenor of Holley described off-road racer Ryan Beat, who met him at SEMA a few times and "wasn't pushy." Before any deal, Beat offered to bring a spare truck to Holley's LS Fest West and do donuts in the burnout contest. "That's how you build a relationship, by, what can I do for you first?" Tichenor said. Later Beat was losing plug wires in a cramped engine bay, and it cost him a race. "So I showed him a product that could solve a problem, gave him some plug wires, and now I'm using him in ads for the plug wires because we truly solved his problem." On the same panel, the Wheel Pros executive said Beat also helps them develop a better Pro Lite wheel, with sensors on his car measuring loads. Kietzmann pointed out Beat wears a BELL helmet too. One driver, three brands, all because he made himself useful. ▶ Watch the panel

Be relentless about it

Ryan Thomas, team manager of Polaris Factory Racing, wanted to race professionally himself when he was young, and he didn't wait to be discovered. "I let everybody in my sphere and then some know that, yeah, this is what I want to do someday," he said. He went to Ivan Stewart's house to ask what it would take. "I got in front of everybody that I could, telling them exactly what my plans were and asking for any advice that I could get." Sending five emails and waiting doesn't count, he said. Show up where the people you want to meet will be, and "you need to be intentional."

His last word for a young amateur who is winning but still unsponsored: results are only the entry fee. "The race results, that's almost like the bare minimum," he said. "Race car drivers are influencers. We've always been influencers. That's the reason that you got sponsored." ▶ Watch Ryan Thomas's advice

The takeaway

• Learn the manufacturer's business: who finances, insures, upgrades and sells its vehicles. Those partners pay for factory programs.
• Strip decals that don't pay or supply you so scouting brands can see an open opportunity.
• Make your first contact a sample of your marketing, creative and specific to that brand.
• Take the bottom rung of a big brand's program, overdeliver and expect to be judged at least half on what you do off the track.
• Earn recommendations and solve problems for brands before you ask them for anything.

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