Ten hours before the start of Friday night’s Food City 250 NASCAR Busch race at Bristol Motor Speedway, Jason Keller was at the track roaming the Winston Cup garage area. It’s the time of the year when discussions about driver-team-sponsor combinations for the next season intensify, and Keller finds himself moving in the middle of them. Although Keller’s driving situation for 2004 has been unclear for months, it became even more clouded this week when his team’s primary sponsor, Albertson’s supermarkets, said it would not return next season. Earlier in the year, ppc Racing’s other sponsor, Nesquik, announced it would not return to the Scott Riggs team for 2004. Now, despite having two drivers wrestling for the series championship, team owner Greg Pollex is looking for two primary sponsorships to keep his team running at the front next year. With the unstable economy making sponsor searches difficult, Keller is fishing for every available opportunity. Pollex said Friday that chances are slim that his team will fold and that he hopes Keller and Riggs will return next season. “We’ve had three or four real good conversations (with potential sponsors) since last weekend. None of them may turn out, but they’re real solid leads,” he said. “We have four or five commitments from associate sponsors for next year. It’s possible we could race with that in the beginning of the season if we had to. But NASCAR’s giving us a lot of help. They’ve said we’re the premier Busch series team they’ve had for the past several years, and they want us back on the track.”(Greenville News)(8-23-2003)
