Fruit of the Loom will sponsor Robby Gordon's Cup ride for nine races in '05. Credit: Turner Sports Interactive

Gordon takes the plunge

As owner-driver, pressure is on to produce for sponsors

When NASCAR first got its start, the vast majority of the drivers owned their cars. It stayed that way, for the most part, well into the 1960s despite periods of big-team dominance and factory shenanigans.

All that changed in the recent past, as the sport was increasingly dominated by multi-car super teams like Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing, Roush Racing and others.

The last high-profile driver to own his cars outright was Ricky Rudd, and he sold his operation five years ago to drive for Robert Yates.

That is until this year. Robby Gordon left RCR to form his own team, which is an outgrowth of the Busch Series operation he formed in 2004. Owning the cars you drive is a big step, because as a car owner you have to worry about things like overhead, travel budgets and fabrication costs. Drivers do worry about those things, but not in quite the same way an owner does.

Robby Gordon Credit: Autostock

"I only speak from my experiences," Gordon said about being an owner/driver. "I've been very fortunate to work for a guy like Richard Childress who has won championships in Cup racing. I understand the way he ran his business as far as how the cars were prepared inside and out. Two of the races I won for Richard, we produced the chassis; they were road-course chassis. Robby Gordon Motorsports produced the chassis, RCR put the engines and bodies in them, so it was a team effort. And I think it can be done.

"Back in 1992, everybody questioned if Alan Kulwicki could do it. And we have some things here that are similar with the No. 7. We've got an owner/driver. And I think the real answer is that I don't plan on running the team. John Story runs the business side of it. Bob Temple runs the racecar side of it. I don't do the accounting and I don't do the PR. I drive the racecar. I'm fortunate that if I don't like one individual on the team, I can get rid of him now. Where before, I've been in situations where I couldn't do that because I had no say. I'm just the driver. Here, I'm the driver but I do have some say."

Just how Gordon got to where he is -- Fruit of the Loom will sponsor his Nextel Cup Series machine for nine races this season -- is quite a story in itself and quite revealing about business as it is conducted in NASCAR.

"Sixteen months ago, I hired [business manager] John Story and our first vision was that we wanted to get a Busch car so that the following year it would be easier to sell a Cup car because we have a race team," Gordon said. "The second goal was that we would move the shops from Mooresville closer to Charlotte. Our next goal was to be a Cup team in 15 months. We've been able to make all our goals across the board.

"First, we got Fruit of the Loom to do a 24-race Busch deal," he continued. "That's all I wanted to do because I didn't want to go to every Busch race weekend. I wanted to do the Cup companion races. And then we wanted to win races, which we were able to do. We rolled out at Daytona our very first (Busch) race. We threatened to win. We qualified fifth and finished third in our very first race. The difference between a Busch car and a Cup car is five inches of wheelbase and a carburetor. Everything else it pretty much the same."

That being said, it all comes down to people -- just as it does in every competitive business environment.

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"We think if we get the right people -- the people make the difference between good teams and bad teams," Gordon said. "The people we had last year, like my [Busch] crew chief, Bob Temple, were the right people. He was the right choice because of the job he did for us last year, to move him up to the Cup program with us. So Bob Temple will be our crew chief. I brought him to Cup racing in 1997. He worked with me at Derrick Walker Racing [in Indy cars]. I brought him to SABCO. I stayed there for five years until we were ready to revamp and regroup and have a program that was a long-term program that he could build his future on as well. And then we started the Busch team last year."

Remember the comment about overhead? The shop is the biggest chunk of that, and it tends to cost. Gordon moved his operation from Mooresville to a new building on 35 acres at the intersection of I-77 and I-485 in Charlotte. "We have plenty of room to expand. And we're going to expand our building. Probably before Charlotte we'll be up to around 60,000 square feet."

With the team and the shop in place, it was time to find a sponsor.

"When we did the deal with Fruit of the Loom, it was a three-year program," Gordon said. "For a while, I wanted to keep them in the Busch Series because I wanted the Busch team to be the test team for the Cup team. In August, we thought we had a deal done with [energy drink maker] Red Bull and they ended up buying a Formula One team [the former Jaguar team] instead. We were a bargain for the Formula One deal, but I still have a good relationship with them."

Red Bull spends money in the U.S. on marketing and sponsorship, but at heart, the Austrian-based company's soul is in Formula One. "They are Formula One enthusiasts and that's what they wanted to do," Gordon said. "We tried to get our Cup deal signed before the Formula One deal, because we knew once that happened all the money would go there. We missed it by maybe a week or two. If we just would have had that deal done, we could have announced that program for Cup, but we went back to work and now have a series of deals that will work out to a full-time program."

When you're a single-car team, the choices you have are limited to what you can afford and what works for you. Gordon took the whole question of engine supply and did something quite unique: he outsourced to a third-party that has not been involved in the sport before last year.

"When you race against teams that supply engines to you, obviously you're not going to get the best stuff," Gordon said. "What we've done is hooked up with John Menard from Menard Inc., and he has an engine shop. They've been on the pole for the Indy 500 six times. They've made Buick turbocharged V-6 engines that made 1200 horsepower. Since then, he's built the IRL engines for Chevrolet.

"He bought TWR in England, which is now MEG, Menard Engine Group, and they produce all of our parts in England -- the cranks, rods and pistons -- everything except the Chevrolet block. A lot of teams buy somebody else's parts. Menard can produce all the parts for the engine. They build the parts in England and ship the parts to Indianapolis and they put the motor in a box like I used to get in Indy car racing and it shows up at my shop in Charlotte. So that's the first thing that's different. We did that before we did anything else so we'd have our engine program put together and that would allow us to be competitive.

After having run a Menard engine at Dover and Michigan last year in a Busch race and leading both races, Gordon ran one of Menard's restrictor-plate engines at Daytona on Tuesday.

"The motor we're running [Tuesday] is the very first time that Menard has ever produced a restrictor-plate Cup engine," he said. "So we're going to learn a lot at this test over the next three days. Our goal is obviously to be quick, but we realize that these teams in Cup have been producing restrictor-plate engines for years and it might take a little bit of time to catch on to the restrictor-plate program. When we leave here, we have a few more weeks to catch up before the race."

On the business side, having multiple sponsors for a single season is a recurring theme in NASCAR racing, Story said. "I think it will be a trend. Some of the bigger teams obviously have a lot of success on their side and they can go out there and ask for $15 million, $16 million or $17 million and get it. We certainly hope we're one of those teams in a relatively short period of time. But we knew better than to go out and start asking for that amount of money for an upstart team. So we divided everything by four and started asking for it.

"The good thing about that is that when you negotiate with a sponsor and ask for a smaller piece of the pie, you don't have as much to negotiate with, if that makes sense. You don't have to take too much off the top to get a sponsor to commit. They understand what they're buying. If they're buying nine races for x-number of dollars, they pretty much take it or leave it. Once you've got all four of those sponsors in place, you're right back where you were. You didn't start with a $16 million program and negotiate it all the way back to a $10 or $12 million program.

"Eighteen months ago when we laid out the goals, we decided to look at it as a four-part program," Story added. "Red Bull came along and it was going to be the full program. It was a bit of a surprise to us that there were still people out there with that kind of money. Actually, you see it a little bit. It's a smart way for a company to market. They still get all the same benefits of being associated with a driver and a team in NASCAR without paying the whole thing."

Gordon is a racer from the word go. He's raced Indy cars, road-racing cars, off-road cars and pretty much anything else he can get his hands on. He's racing Indy and off-road in the same season while holding down a full-time NASCAR ride. That much racing tends to make sponsors have dizzy spells, but Gordon has figured a way around all that.

"I race cars because I like to and I have fun doing it," he said. "I do other forms of motorsports because I can do that and be competitive too. I think the sponsors understand that I like to race. I've got to have good people and a good business plan in place. It's not that difficult. You can make it a lot more difficult than it is.

"Right now, I'm the attraction for the sponsor. And yeah, we need to be a little bit careful for the next year and a half until we can get to a second car."

Nobody ever said that Gordon didn't have talent and ambition. Perhaps as an owner-driver, both of those qualities will be maximized.