Pit and Paddock Displays: Your Pit Is a Showroom

Most racers spend their whole weekend in the pits and think of it as a workplace. Sponsors see it differently. For a brand, your pit is the one spot at the track where its logo stops moving. Fans walk up, stand still, ask questions and take pictures there. That makes it the closest thing your sponsor has to a showroom at every race you enter.

The good news is that a better pit display costs less than almost any other activation. It takes some planning, a little hardware and the habit of treating every visitor as a customer of the brands on your car.

Perception is everything

Ron Capps, the NHRA Funny Car champion and team owner, learned this early, driving for one of the biggest operations in drag racing. "What really stuck with me was the small things," he told the Drag Racing Sponsorship Summit. "When you walk up to a pit area, the scooter out front, the golf cart, it's not just pulled in in front in an angle. Everything's lined up perfect. When you walk in the pit area, yes, the crew has to work and there's tools flying, but you have to have everything look nice, for lack of a better word, presentable."

He described what happens when sanctioning-body staff walk a group of potential sponsors through the pits. The prospects tend to land with the big, polished teams, and smaller teams complain. "But you walk to their pit area and you look around, it looks like a swap meet. And I've always told people that perception is everything. I don't care if your car runs, doesn't have to win. It doesn't have to run great, but you got to look halfway decent because people aren't going to want you to represent if you don't." ▶ Watch Ron Capps on this

You don't control who walks past your pit on a given Saturday. You do control whether it looks like a business worth backing when they do.

Make every part on the car a conversation

A tidy pit is the minimum. A display makes it useful to your sponsors. Dan Dennehy-Rodriguez of the Sports Car Club of America pointed out that every form of racing has one thing in common. "We all have a paddock area and we all have the opportunity to use our paddock area as an asset," he said on the activation panel at the Motorsports Sponsorship Summit.

He described a club driver who "blew my mind" with a cheap setup. "One of our drivers blew my mind by using easily set up displays with QR codes so that when you see him working on his car and you think to yourself, man, what does he have on his build? Well, he represents all of his partners using a QR code so that whenever someone comes up, he can very easily have that conversation of, oh, I use this sway bar, I use this end link, I use this product." ▶ Watch Dan Dennehy-Rodriguez explain it

That's a showroom in its simplest form. The car is the product demo, the display names the parts, and the QR code sends the curious fan straight to the sponsor's website. It also gives you something to point at when a sponsor asks what you did for them at the track.

Give people something to do, not just something to see

Martelli, CEO of the Mint 400, says the brands that do best at his events refuse to wait for people to notice them. When BFGoodrich asked to park one of its racers' trucks in the middle of Fremont Street during the race's downtown Las Vegas festival, he said yes right away. "Now everybody's got to walk around it with a big target on the ground," he said. "That's a great way to engage everybody and to make sure that you're not going to sit back and hope that people see your brand. You know, you've got to be aggressive in event activation." ▶ Watch Matt Martelli on this

Spectators stopped by the thousands to take selfies with the truck, and those photos went onto their social feeds with the sponsor's logo in the background. "What we want as promoters is we want every single person there to be posting and tagging us and our sponsors," Martelli said. "So creating these opportunities for people to... create social media content is key."

He showed another example on the same panel, the Rugged Radios autograph session. "What Rugged does is they bring all their sponsored riders down to the event and they have them sign autographs. They've done it now multiple years. So it's become like an anchor point of everybody knows that that's the place to go to sign autographs. It's become actually so successful that a lot of the drivers who aren't sponsored by them actually come and do signatures there." ▶ See the full session

A grassroots team can borrow both ideas. Park the car where people can stand next to it, put the sponsor's logo where it will show up in the photo, and hold an autograph session at the same time every race so fans know where to find you.

Let a few fans all the way in

Martelli's other favorite move costs nothing but a seat. At the Mint 400 parade, "we had a couple of racers that they took fans off their social media accounts and put them in the race car, the co-driver seat for the parade. That's how you do it," he said in his Meet the Sponsors interview. "It's really reaching out and letting people communicate with you and making them feel like they're special. Now, of course, the math equation, you can't do that for every single fan... You only have to do it for a few that you can. And the other fans see that and they appreciate that." ▶ Watch the interview

The same thinking works in a pit. Let a kid sit in the car. Give a fan a short tour of the trailer. Hand a regular a crew shirt. The few people who get the full experience will talk about it, and everybody watching sees a team that welcomes them.

Put your sponsors on the table, not just the car

Dystany Spurlock, a motorcycle drag racer and BMW ambassador, uses her merchandise table as a display for every partner. "I ask all of my sponsors if they have like little tchotchkes that I can put out on my table along with my merchandise so that way when people come by, you know, they don't have to buy a shirt, one of my shirts or something like that, they can just pick up, you know, a little tchotchke," she told the Motorcycle Racing Sponsorship Summit. ▶ Watch Dystany Spurlock describe her setup

Her goal is bigger than freebies. "My goal for all my sponsors, I want all of them to have a huge setup... bring some things that people can see, touch, feel," she said. Even when a sponsor can't send people, a stack of stickers, a catalog or a sample on your table gives every visitor something of theirs to take home.

Take the display on the road

The showroom doesn't have to stay at the track. Long before he drove for a major team, Capps was working the phone for the cars he crewed on. "I would call ahead and try to get the guy that owned the car hotel rooms free," he said, with an offer attached: "Call ahead and say, hey, we can maybe put our car on display in front of your hotel when the guys get into town. Just little things like that, because it's those little things that ended up getting me my rides." ▶ Watch Capps tell the story

A race car parked in front of a hotel, a parts store or a sponsor's business on the night before a race draws a crowd. It's the same display you set up in the pits, put in front of people who weren't planning to go to the track.

The takeaway

• Keep the pit clean and organized enough that a sponsor would be proud to bring a client there.
• Add a simple display that names your partners' parts, with a QR code that leads to each brand.
• Make your pit a spot where fans take photos, with the sponsor logo in the frame.
• Hold autograph sessions at a predictable time and place so they become a fixture.
• Put sponsor samples or small items on your table so every visitor takes a brand home.