Tony Stewart’s #20 Home Depot Toyota will sport a slightly different look when it takes to the track for this weekend’s Sprint Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. The traditional orange and black colors of primary sponsor Home Depot will remain, but in celebration of the Atlanta-based company’s 10-year anniversary as a proud NASCAR sponsor and staunch supporter of Stewart and Joe Gibbs Racing, a special paint scheme designed by one of The Home Depot’s 350,000 associates will adorn the #20 machine. In a company-wide contest that began on Dec. 17, 2007 and ended on Jan. 18, 2008, Home Depot associates were encouraged to design the car that Stewart would drive March 9 at Atlanta. From a total of 351 entries, the winning design came from the pen of Scott Foreman, a Pro Desk Sales Associate who works at The Home Depot in Brighton, Colo. A Pro Desk Sales Associate like Foreman bleeds orange, for they are on the front line of The Home Depot’s core customer – general contractors and do-it-yourselfers who view no home improvement project as too large. The Home Depot entered NASCAR with a bang in 1999, as the world’s largest home improvement specialty retailer became the Official Home Improvement Warehouse of NASCAR. Augmenting that platform, The Home Depot also signed to sponsor a newly formed second team of Joe Gibbs Racing with a rookie crew chief and a rookie driver who had made a name for himself in open-wheel race cars but was still a stock car neophyte.(True Speed Communication/Joe Gibbs Racing), see images of the scheme on my #20 Team Schemes page.(3-5-2008)
