Company preserves classic races on DVD for purchase

If you're a fan of any particular sport or team, you probably would like the chance to relive your team's great performances any time you feel like it.

Say you're a University of Georgia graduate and would like to pull out a Herschel Walker whooping to lay on your friends, graduates of that certain school in Gainesville, Fla. Or, say you're a Dale Earnhardt fan and you would like to select a whooping he gave somewhere, some time.

Clayton Nichols is the guy you want to talk to about it.

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Nichols, who runs Team Marketing Inc., produces and markets videos of specific NASCAR races -- all the way from the green flag to the checkered flag. Full races, it seems, are a selling point to NASCAR fans, and Nichols and the rest of the folks at Team Marketing have taken a successful business built on college football and parlayed it into a successful NASCAR franchise as well.

"We've been working with ISC about three, three and a half years now," Nichols said. "We had gotten into the college market about five years ago, and a company that we worked with had released the ABC national championship for Ohio State, full-game version. In the past, that had never been done before. Nobody had ever done a full event on DVD. About 140,000 units later, we said, 'You know what? There's something here.'

"We went out and started grabbing other collegiate titles. We didn't really have anything to sell in the summertime. We talked about it as a company, and we said, 'Let's go after NASCAR.'"

Smart move, as it turned out. Nichols had a friend who worked at International Speedway Corp., and they started talking.

"We told them, 'We'd like to release the 1998 Daytona 500 on DVD,'" Nichols recalled. "We released it, and about 80,000 units later, we thought, 'We've got something here.' The fans like the full races, and it gives us something to sell in the months that aren't full of college sports."

For instance, the 1987 Winston 500 at Talladega Superspeedway was a watershed race for NASCAR, because Bobby Allison's crash on the front straightaway brought about restrictor plates.

That race is one of the "seven or eight" races that Nichols and his Team Marketing folks have released. Another is the 50th Anniversary Daytona 500 DVD, which features clips from each of the 50 races.

"Each one of the races we do has a historic reason for doing it," Nichols said. "It was the Allison father-son 500, Elliott qualifying at more than 200 mph, Dale Earnhardt's 1998 Daytona victory, that kind of historic event."

"For the new NASCAR fan, it's not your daddy's DVD," Nichols said. "The cars are different, the drivers aren't making as much money ... it was good-ol'-boy racing. Now it's sort of different, scientific racing. We've had really good response from it."

Even though response has been strong, Nichols said the big thing now is to find the market for the product. Currently, the DVDs are sold on NASCAR.COM and other Web-based outlets, as well as Wal-Mart and a dozen other delivery channels. That's to find out what works, Nichols said.

"Right now, it's about finding out where we go with them," he said. "NASCAR.COM is a good partner of ours, but right now, there's so much branded NASCAR product out there that people have trouble finding them among the layers."

Team Marketing, headquartered in Owensboro, Ky., has some juice when it comes to distribution, providing wholesale pricing to retailers for sports-related DVDs and having partnership and distribution agreements with all the major studios in the entertainment industry.

The company is a division of WaxWorks Inc., one of the pioneers in the home entertainment industry since 1949. The origin of the parent company was in the retailing and wholesaling of pre-recorded music more than 50 years ago, moving through to become one of the original distributors of pre-recorded video products in 1980 with the birth of the VCR. Today, WaxWorks Inc. is the authorized wholesale distributor for all major studios and scores of independent video sources.

Rather than waiting for ESPN or one of the other networks to show a classic race such as the 1998 Daytona 500, you can now have it for your very own. Nichols said he gets hundreds of requests for particular races for a variety of reasons.

"We get e-mails that say, 'We love this ... when's the next one?' or 'Can you do this one, I was there with my dad,'" he said. "The nostalgia factor is really kicking in."

Nostalgia aside, if you're a serious NASCAR fan, you want these important, watershed events simply for reference. Who knows when a Jeff Gordon fan is going to challenge Earnhardt fans to some sort of contest. Wouldn't it be nice to slide one of these videos in the player for the purposes of another whooping?