UPDATE: MBM Motorsports owner Carl Long says he talked to NASCAR officials on Wednesday and was told that the team’s exclusion from the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series was an oversight.
“Thanks for all your support of MBM / Timmy Hill being left out of the iRace at Bristol. There was so much support for us we were in the top 6 trending tweets today in the USA… This once again proves there is a ton of NASCAR followers and the sport is stronger than the ratings portray it..
I sent an email out this morning to a few NASCAR executives asking for an explanation. Today I had a return invite to join Steve Phelps, Steve O’Donnell, and Tim Clark on a Webex meeting. I had to download the app on my phone and join in.. After a few moments of the conversation, I lost signal and dropped the call.. Just my luck, I hung up on the President of NASCAR.. Tim called me back direct and we discussed how this occurred.
To make a long story short, like the movie Home Alone, they forgot one of their kids! Steps are being taken to make sure we are in the information pipeline.
It does make me feel good to know the top leadership of NASCAR does care about us (the little teams trying to grow). I hope to be included in future conversations about the less funded side of the garage.
I hope this exposure will help everyone realize there is a lot of passionate race fans still supporting NASCAR racing. These fans are also consumers and sponsors..
Currently MBM has some sponsors, but none for the next 3 Cup races. We are proud to have LiftKits4Less.com, AP4Less.com, Smithbilt Homes, CrashClaimsR.US, Whataburger, Jani-King, and Supreme Transportation as primary sponsors at select events for our 3 Xfinity and 1.5 Cup teams. We need to get sponsorship for all the races. This type of positive exposure could help in our search.”
ORIGINAL POST: When the entry list for the season-opening Pro Invitational race at the virtual dirt Bristol Motor Speedway was announced, [Timmy] Hill’s name was not among the 38 participants. The loss is huge for Hill and his MBM Motorsports team, as they were banking on both exposure and TV time from these events to help sell sponsorships for their real racecar.
“We try to package our real life racing to the Pro Invitational,” Hill told Frontstretch. “We kind of really leveraged [that to sponsors], because we try to really package it all together.”
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“We were running Cup races this year, despite NASCAR cutting their prize money back on us, purposely so we would make the Pro Invitational,” Hill said. “So now with all these odds stacked against us, not being invited to the Pro Invitational with NASCAR also cutting the prize money back, there’s no incentive for us to run a Cup race. So we’ll probably end up cutting the Cup schedule back now.”
Still, Hill won’t give up on his dreams of being a star in NASCAR. He will remain a competitor in Xfinity for MBM and own a truck in the Camping World Truck Series, splitting driving duties between himself and his brother, Tyler. This week at Bristol, he has dirt ringer Mike Marlar in that truck on a one-race deal.
— Frontstretch —