The National Guard announced on Wednesday that it is dropping its sponsorship of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the Hendrick Motorsports team. In addition, the National Guard will no longer sponsor Indy Racer Graham Rahal.
The decision was announced as the National Guard is making changes to how it recruits and sponsors sports, which will include significantly lower budgets for sponsoring. The Army Guard had pumped $32 million into sponsoring NASCAR and another $12 million on IndyCar this year. Deals with both sports will end at the end of the current season.
“Significantly constrained resources and the likelihood of further reductions in the future call for more innovative and cost-effective ways of doing business,” Maj Gen Judd H. Lyons, acting Director of the Army National Guard, said in a statement. “We believe industry and open competition can help us identify effective and efficient solutions to help us meet our marketing and recruiting objectives within budget constraints.”
According to NASCAR, Hendrick Motorsports officials didn’t know that the Guard was planning on dropping its sponsorship before Wednesday.
“Our team has a contract in place to continue the National Guard program at its current level in 2015,” the team said in a statement. “We have not been approached by the Guard about potential changes and plan to honor our current agreement.”
Earnhardt's other major sponsors include Kelley Blue Book and PepsiCo.
The Army National Guard has been working to trim sports sponsorships since 2012, to the point that the IndyCar and NASCAr sponsorships were it. With these new cuts, the sponsorship budget for fiscal 2015 will be around half of fiscal 2012’s budget.
“As part of a broad recruitment marketing strategy, motorsports partnerships—including NASCAR—played an important role in helping the National Guard build strong brand awareness and in turn helped us achieve extraordinary recruiting and end-strength objectives over the past decade,” Lt Col Christian Johnson, the head of Army Guard marketing, said in a statement.
image courtesy of Jeff Daly/INFevents.com
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