Motorsports marketing agency, RKR MotorSports has inked a long-term primary sponsorship deal for Brett Bodine Racing’s #11 NASCAR Winston Cup team. While the identity of the new sponsor has not yet been made public, this new sponsorship program will begin during the second half of 2003 and continue through completion of the 2005 season. Complete details will be announced at a press conference in the coming weeks.( BBR PR )(8-12-2003) UPDATE: Brett Bodine’s concerns ended Tuesday, when he signed the largest primary sponsorship contract his team has ever had. The deal, which is expected to begin at the Mountain Dew Southern 500 at Darlington, S.C., on Aug. 31, will last through the 2005 season. The deal was announced Tuesday on Bodine’s official Web site, www.brettbodine.com. Bodine could not be reached for comment Wednesday. The name of the sponsor, which Bodine said in June would be new to NASCAR, will be announced at a press conference in a few weeks. “This is going to be more money than he’s ever had,” team spokeswoman Carolyn Carrier said from her North Carolina home Wednesday night. Carrier said Bodine told her, “This is such a huge relief to know we have a future. I definitely slept better last night.” Bodine had been running a scaled-down Winston Cup schedule this year, with a small sponsorship from Hooters. Since Hooters left the team in June, Bodine has attempted to race in only one event, the Brickyard 400 earlier this month. Bodine had been courting this sponsor prior to learning of Hooters’ decision to pull its money. Carrier said the money should be able to take the team up a level, though it will probably take some time to do so. “You can’t just spend that kind of money overnight and expect to come out of the box and improve,” she said. “It will help us get the people, the equipment, and get everything the way we had hoped to be all these years.” She said real improvement should be seen heading into the 2004 season. “Every year we’ve been scrambling at the last minute not knowing what we were going to do,” Carrier said. “This will be such a total relief to be able to plan ahead for a change. We’ve never been able to do that.” Carrier, who said Bodine had to lay off “most everybody” on the team, said he is in the process of hiring people back. “We were bare bones,” Carrier said. “We didn’t have the funds to do anything and were not sure of the future.” In addition, Carrier said a deal is in the works for the team to run in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2004, with Brett’s older brother, Geoffrey, doing the driving. “That looks good,” she said. “That would just be icing on the cake. It would be wonderful.”( Elmira Star Gazette )(8-14-2003)
