Sponsors are the holy grail—or “holy griddle” as my then-four-year-old daughter used to call it—of offshore powerboat racing. Teams need them. Race producers need them. Sanctioning bodies need them.
Sponsor dollars help the sport survive.
Sponsor dollars help make the offshore racing world go round. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
If it were my job to thank offshore racing sponsors, I would. Hell, I’ll thank them anyway. Thank you for supporting a whole lot of people I care about as they pursue something they love. You help make them happy. You help make and their families and fans happy. That’s worth a lot.
So thank you.
For their support, sponsors get to slap their company names and logos on anything—from raceboats to helicopters to posters at race sites—agreed to in their contracts. And power to them, that is what they’re paying for.
If they find value in whatever form their sponsorship takes, they stick around. If they don’t, they move on. That’s just good business.
No matter how long a sponsor lasts, the sport owes all of them—past and present—a debt of gratitude.
What it doesn’t owe them is fealty and obedience, much less influence inside the sport. I’m reasonably certain there are no clauses to that effect in their contracts.
Short version? Racers compete, race-producers produce events, sanctioning bodies sanction and sponsors pay to market whatever they’re selling through their sponsorships.
And don’t be confused. Every sponsor in the sport is quite rightly selling something.
But that and that alone is the lane they pay to travel.
They need to stay in it