Roush Fenway makes its pitch to Red Sox Nation (cont'd)

Toward that end, the team is putting its logo on the No. 99 car Edwards will drive this weekend in the Lenox Industrial Tools 300. Major League Baseball rules allow the Red Sox to market only in New England, so New Hampshire is the only Nextel Cup venue where a Red Sox car can take to the track. Lumber Liquidators, a Red Sox marketing partner run by a native Bostonian, will back the vehicle and share space on the car. Show cars sporting similar livery will make appearances at Lumber Liquidator outlets around New England throughout the summer.

"I'm going to be driving a pretty neat racecar, and we're going to go spend a little time up in Fenway Park and hang out with those folks," Edwards said. "It's going to be good."

From a Roush perspective, the hope is that the race team can tap into the baseball franchise's sponsorship base and generate new streams of revenue. Roush saw it happen with Joe Gibbs, whose relationship with the Atlanta Falcons -- he was a minority owner of the NFL organization before returning to the sidelines -- helped him secure Atlanta-based Home Depot as a car sponsor. Gibbs' association with the Washington Redskins, where he is now head coach, helped him land FedEx, which also holds the naming rights to the Redskins' stadium.

"We looked at that and said, 'OK, what kind of advantage does that give him in selling?'" asked Geoff Smith, president of Roush Fenway Racing. "So when we got this opportunity to talk to the Fenway Sports Group people, we thought, this is great. They have an unbelievable demographic and brand relationship and loyalty in a marketplace that's ripe for some more NASCAR enthusiasm. I think those two companies, us and Gibbs, are the ones that are using other sports as a marketing lever."

That could change when Nextel Cup team owner Ray Evernham cements his expected partnership deal with George Gillette, owner of the NHL's Montreal Canadiens. Race teams don't make such moves because they have to financially. They do it because they feel they have to competitively.

"We could have run our business just fine indefinitely without selling off a nickel's worth," Smith said. "But we looked at the bigger picture. Right now, here's a bigger picture issue. You've got Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson all in the same camp [for 2008], getting very high sponsorship levels. We need to compete against that. We need similar type funding to be able to put a competitive program on the racetrack. How do you get that? You have to have some type of marketing advantage to try to compete against that."

And the Roush team hopes that advantage is the Fenway Sports Group. The activities of this weekend are only a precursor to bigger moves surely to come, when both the racing team and the baseball franchise begin activating sponsorships that play off one another. That's when the partnership will become much more noticeable than it is now.

"Seeing the competitive landscape, I think it makes sense for them to take on a strategic partner. But I don't think there's an immediate rate of return or spike in the business," Kennedy said. "The Red Sox and our group getting involved, it does lend some credibility to the sport in a market like New England, where it's not as big a part of the culture and the landscape. We recognize that it's probably a long road. It's hard to convert fans overnight. But we think blending the high profile nature of NASCAR with the high profile nature of the Red Sox is a great way to expose the brand of our drivers to the 14 million people of New England."