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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: McMurray Grabs McDonald’s Sponsorship
McDonald’s sponsorship solidifies funding for Jamie McMurray's car for rest of the season...
Bob Pockrass  | http://www.scenedaily.com  |  Posted February 26, 2010   Las Vegas, NV
Jamie McMurray's No. 1 Chevrolet will carry McDonald's as a sponsor for the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. (Photo: Getty Images)

While his new McDonald’s sponsorship has created a lot of puns and creative marketing slogans for driver Jamie McMurray, the possibility of racing nearly half the season without sponsorship was no laughing matter to McMurray and his Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team.

With McDonald’s backing the team for about a third of the Sprint Cup season, there are only a handful of races left for Earnhardt Ganassi to fill for the Daytona 500 winner.

“I was worried,” McMurray said Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “We didn’t have a full-time sponsor, a full year sold. But after winning the 500, [team manager Tony] Glover leaned over and looked at me in victory lane and he said he thought we were pretty safe and we could run the whole season.

“I felt pretty good at that point. It takes a lot of money to run a race team. I was definitely concerned with what was going to happen, although I will say they felt comfortable if the McDonald’s sponsorship wasn’t here, they had enough one-race or two-race things to run the entire season.”

With Bass Pro Shops sponsoring the team for half the season, the team needed sponsorship to fill out the rest of the year. Obviously the Daytona 500 victory didn’t hurt in attracting McDonald’s.

“These sponsorship deals don’t just come off of a race,” McMurray said. “It takes a long time to not only sell the sponsor, but for the sponsor to go back and sell it to the board.

“It’s not something that winning the Daytona 500 did all of a sudden to bring the next sponsorship to our team. They’ve been working very hard on that to get sponsorship sold, although it certainly doesn’t hurt to win.”

The negotiations with McDonald’s had started well before the Daytona 500.

“We’ve been working with them for a long time,” EGR President Steve Lauletta said. “Obviously it was great to send them a note from victory lane in Daytona saying, ‘How great is this?’

“It doesn’t hurt to win a race like that to push things along, but we were pretty well down the road before that.”

The addition of sponsorship will allow the team to focus on sponsorship for 2011 for the team.

“It allows us to start developing more relationships that will pay off in 2011 and beyond,” Lauletta said. “We had a budget that we had set for that, and based on what we did last year, we thought we would find sponsorship for the whole year anyway. What this does is allow us to add a really powerful brand to our partner lineup and develop what we hope will be a long-term relationship.”

The McDonald’s sponsorship is only a NASCAR deal (McDonald’s ended its IndyCar Series sponsorship of Graham Rahal after last season), and Lauletta said the organization hopes to activate the sponsorship using the car’s No. 1 to help promote the dollar menu for McDonald’s. On his uniform and on his car, McMurray has the first letter of his name using the McDonald’s “M” logo.

“It’s just a huge next step in terms of validation of what we’re doing on the track and off the track to have a brand like McDonald’s come on board to join Target and Bass Pro,” Lauletta said. “It says to everybody in our shop and hopefully people watching the sport that we’re a team on the move.”

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Bob Pockrass

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