Kyle Busch began the season with big aspirations as the owner of the two-truck Kyle Busch Motorsports NASCAR Camping World Truck Series team. But as the U.S. economy continues to drag and sponsorship dollars are getting harder and harder to come by, reality is setting in.
Friday morning at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Busch said that if he can’t find sponsorship for his now one-truck team in 2011, he won’t return to the Truck Series as an owner.
Busch began 2010 with two trucks, the No. 18 that he was going to share with Brian Ickler and the No. 56 for Tayler Malsam. But just days before the season began, Busch lost Miccosukee Resorts as the No. 18’s primary sponsor. That led him to shut down the No. 56, while continuing to run the No. 18 mostly out of his own pocket. He won’t do that again next year.
“I don’t really have a deadline set,” Busch said Friday morning at NHMS, when asked about his timetable for finding a sponsor. “As far as it being detrimental to the Truck Series, I think it’s going to be pretty detrimental to not have myself in the series.”
Busch said a dearth of sponsorships in the Truck Series has led to fire-sale pricing, which has hurt his team.
“The series is, as we all know, is a lower-budgeted series, but there’s a lot of guys struggling to find funding,” said Busch. “I know a couple guys out there that put sponsors on their trucks for almost a whole year for $250,000, $300,000. That’s flooding the market. That’s just killing the Truck Series. You can’t do that. They’ve gotta get something.”
And after building a new, state-of-the-art shop for his team and self-funding his team, Busch admitted that he’s faced challenging economic decisions, as have other teams looking for sponsorship.
“For myself, it’s hard. It’s very hard,” he said. “Look at Tony Stewart, he’s gotta find half of a sponsor for next year. Jeff Gordon has gotta find something for next year. Mark Martin, they have hendrickcars.com. That’s not a sponsor, that’s Rick Hendrick putting his money on that car. You look at a bunch of the Nationwide cars. It’s all across the board. (Kevin) Harvick has been struggling trying to find stuff for his truck program, too.”
Busch painted a fairly bleak picture of the near-term future.
“It’s unfortunate the way the economy is,” he said. “It’s gonna be difficult for us race teams to stay in business without being able to have sponsors on our trucks or our cars.”
And, he said, there were other challenges, as well.
“It’s bad for the race teams to have to work through so many hoops in order to get a sponsor,” he said. “For instance, I can’t thank Sprint enough. They do a great job for what they do for the Sprint Cup Series, but it locks out Verizon. It locks out AT&T. It locks out any other telecommunication company that you could try to get in. The tobacco debacle now with the United States government. That’s locked out people that have the money to do it. The people that have the money to do it, can’t or don’t want to do it. The guys that want to do it don’t have the money to do it. You’re fighting two avenues there and being an owner and being able to talk to all these guys, I’m kind of finding that out.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.
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