Black History Month: Funding nothing minor (cont'd)

Arani knows. He's helped piece together deals that have turned into multi-year agreements between corporations and NASCAR. He's also clawed at everything he could get his hands on trying to fund Bill Lester's effort to drive a Nextel Cup car.

He was the driving force that married Lester with Waste Management -- who Arani praises because of "sticking their neck out" -- for the black driver's Cup debut last March at Atlanta. Arani was the one who returned to his Atlanta office after Lester made the show and marched through message after message, e-mail after e-mail -- the fans congratulating the effort and the corporations interested in supporting other efforts.

"We're talking about 100 messages in a day," Arani said. "If you were living in the United States last March and owned a TV set, odds are you knew a black guy was trying to race at Atlanta. We got e-mails from everywhere -- Spain and England. You have no idea the number of companies I spoke to that gave us positive feedback."

Arani was the one who saw to it that every one of those messages was returned. And he was the one who sat in on meetings and pitched packages that seemed to fit perfectly with both Lester and the corporations.

"Every single one of them were followed up on," Arani said of the sponsor interests. "Nothing.

"There were some prominent companies that I'm not going to mention for obvious reasons. And they were companies that make a pretty big commitment to diversity. Two companies that are new this year passed up on Lester, telling us that maybe racing is not for them. When I was in Daytona last week, there they were, so obviously something we told them about NASCAR stuck."

That no company wanted to fund Lester was baffling to Arani and everyone involved in Lester's run.

"We even tried to downgrade and say, OK we'll go out with a six- or nine-race package in the major market area tracks -- Atlanta, Chicago, California, Texas -- and thought there would be some appeal to that," Arani said. "Then people said, well maybe Championship Group doesn't know what they're doing. Well [years ago] we brought M&M Mars to NASCAR, Hershey's, we paired Georgia-Pacific with the Pettys.

"The fact remains, there's not any real traction."

Owner Bill Davis, who provided the car for Lester to drive, said it baffles him that Lester isn't the guy a sponsor would back. Arani simply chose to answer Lester's biggest criticism: age.

"Is Lester a guy you can base a 10-year Cup program around? No, and he knows that," Arani said, noting that Lester could transform into a mentor's role or a front-office decision-maker. "But in two or three years in a car, I would argue he will provide the visibility for a program that is on par with a top-five or top-10 team."

Arani isn't talking about Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Jeff Gordon money. But the change Lester brought to Waste Management isn't cheap, according to Arani.

"The first two Cup races he ran, he brought in $30 million worth of brand exposure," Arani said. "Those aren't my numbers. Those are numbers from an independent company Waste Management hired for that purpose."

So are corporations passing on minority drivers because they are black? Arani said no, that it's part of the sport that sometimes requires more money to compete than is given the winner.

But when it comes to securing sponsorship, Arani emphasized that the issue is not black or white; it's green.

"A lot of people in this sport -- a lot of executives in NASCAR and at corporations --assumed that when Bill Lester arrived as a minority in Nextel Cup, his money worries would be over," Arani said of the ongoing struggle of sponsorship. "It's a universal problem.

"The engines don't know who's driving the car. They don't know if it's a test or qualifying or practice or the race, so they sure don't know who's driving the car. All they know is the cost per mile is the same no matter what. And it's expensive."