Bad Season, Good Partner: Keeping Sponsors When the Results Don't Come

Every racer has the season they'd rather forget. The engine lets go in the second round, a crash eats the budget, the series cancels events, or the podiums just never come. The natural instinct is to go quiet and hope the sponsor doesn't notice. The brands who spoke at my Sponsorship Summits say that's exactly backwards. A bad season rarely ends a good partnership. Disappearing during one often does.

Sponsors know racing is racing

Mark Krumme, marketing manager at Eibach Springs, works with roughly two hundred drivers and teams. He told me results are welcome but nobody at Eibach expects every weekend to go well. "I understand that not everything goes as well as it can, and racing is racing. Performance is always awesome, but you know, Eibach, a big term here, a coined phrase, is the will to win. So we all have the will to win. Sometimes it doesn't turn out that way, but as long as we're there, we got our nose to the grindstone and we're pushing and we're trying and we're developing new products and advancing the brand, that's what we want." ▶ Watch Mark Krumme explain this

He was even more direct when asked for his final advice at the Off-Road Sponsorship Summit. "Wins are great, wins are important, but there are ways to offset performance, provided you are engaged with your partners, you're creating and... getting your deliverables knocked out, and really working together on making it work." ▶ Watch the clip

That's the core of it. Results are one column on the scorecard. Engagement, content and delivered promises are the others, and those you control no matter what happens on track.

Control what you can control

Dan Bailey, founder of EPIC Racewear, put it in terms every short-track racer will recognize. "Do what you say you're going to do, and maybe more. What you do off the track is more important than what you do on the track. You can't control what happens on the track. You know, stuff happens where your night is ended a lot sooner than you wanted it to be, but you can control product activation on Saturday, or you can control your TikTok videos, or you can control unboxing videos and things like that. So control what you can, and do a good job at controlling what you can." ▶ Watch Dan Bailey on this

A DNF on Friday night doesn't cancel the autograph session, the shop visit or the product video you promised. On a bad weekend those become the most important things you deliver.

Tell them before they find out

The worst move in a bad season is silence. Krumme described a social media ambassador who got a special price on an Eibach kit in exchange for deliverables, then went dark. Eibach's social team searched for anything he'd posted and came up empty. The next thing Krumme heard was an email asking for more springs, and only after Krumme asked about the deliverables did a link full of images show up. "It's like, dude, I don't want to have to ask for it," Krumme said.

His advice for a racer who can't deliver: "I'd say honesty is the best policy. If you're not gonna be delivering on what you've got going on, reach out beforehand. You know, don't come knocking when you need something if you haven't done it." Get ahead of it, he said, and tell the sponsor plainly, "look, I can't get them this week. I can't get them this month. You know, this happened, the car broke. We're not gonna be at the race." Most brands will work with that. "Let's figure out how to finish the deliverables. And I think everyone's willing to do that, you know?" ▶ Watch the full episode

Matthew Winter, global off-road marketing manager at Ford Performance, said the same quality is what makes a racer easy to recommend. "The people that I like to work with the most are the people that are just the easiest. They're problem solvers. Be that kind of person that people want to sponsor. You know, be the partner. If there is a problem, you know, bring solutions, not problems to us." ▶ Watch Matthew Winter on this

A blown motor is a problem. A blown motor plus a plan for how you'll still hit the brand's three biggest deliverables is a partner.

Don't make your problem the sponsor's problem

Mitch Covington of Monster Energy's sports marketing team has watched sponsorships come and go for decades. He said one habit wears relationships out faster than losing. "To build long-term relationship, I think you can't always be running to your sponsor constantly to fix things, and most times it's with more money," Covington said. Monster prefers programs that will go racing whether or not the brand writes a bigger check, because "we're looking to sponsor, not build a race team." ▶ Watch Mitch Covington explain this

That doesn't mean hiding trouble. It means coming to the sponsor with what happened and what you're doing about it, not with a request to cover the damage.

Stability is what gets you through the down years

Johnny Greaves has raced with Toyota and Monster Energy for about two decades, through stretches when short-course off-road racing itself was struggling. Covington credited his "commitment to continuing off-road racing at a high level in times when it went through some peaks and valleys." Greaves explained what his sponsors need to believe when a season goes badly.

"You got to instill confidence in these sponsors that, you know, you're going to be there every week, you're going to show up, you're going to look good, you're going to perform, you're not going to let them down. Everybody has their bad days, but at the end of the day, they are very comfortable with our program." When the series had its ups and downs, he said, "these guys knew in their heart that we were going to be there, we were going to be doing our job, we were going to make the best of it, and when it came back, we are going to be there ready to take the next step." ▶ Watch Johnny Greaves on this

Part of that confidence is keeping the same people. Greaves said his sponsors know his crew by name, and they "don't want to be worrying about where's this program going next year and who's his driver and who's his mechanic."

Know when it's not your day

Nate Hunt of Jackson Motorsports Group, the agency that manages BFGoodrich's partnership with Rob MacCachren, shared something MacCachren told him years ago about avoiding bad seasons in the first place. "The hardest thing to do out there on the race course is to know when it's just not your day, and you're just going to have to settle for a finish, and it may be a top 10, it might be a top five, but you just know it's not your day, the truck's not quite right or something happened, luck's not on your side, and to know it's not your day and not to push so hard and wreck the car or DNF." ▶ Watch Nate Hunt tell the story

A finish keeps the logo on camera and the budget intact for next weekend. A wreck can end the season and the content along with it.

The takeaway

• When something goes wrong, call your sponsor before they hear about it, and bring a plan to finish your deliverables.
• Put extra effort into the off-track work you control: appearances, product content, social posts, local media.
• Never let a bad stretch on track turn into silence. Keep sending recaps, even short ones.
• Don't ask a sponsor to bail out a problem. Show them how you're solving it.
• Keep your crew and program stable so the brand trusts you'll still be there when results return.