Hendrickcars.com traffic soars after Stewart's win (cont'd)

With that in mind, Hendrick had the idea to field a Nationwide Series car for the Daytona race and put Stewart in the driver's seat, optimizing the team's chance to win. Even though the money stayed within the Hendrick empire, Hendrick Automotive did write a check to Hendrick Motorsports for the transaction.

A one-race deal with a top Nationwide Series team might typically go for $100,000 or so.

"Mr. Hendrick said to treat the sponsorship like any other corporate relationship," said Pat Perkins, vice president of marketing at Hendrick Motorsports. "So we put together as integrated a program as you can have for a one-race deal. We had a promotion, we supported with [local market] advertising on Time Warner Cable, we had all of the supporting elements in place.

"And the driver was on message."

The promotion offered fans a chance to win the firesuit Stewart wore in the race. About 23,000 entered the sweepstakes and 9,000 registered an interest in buying a vehicle. A majority of those even identified a make and model of interest.

EBizAutos, the company that manages the site, had extra staff on hand during the race and the following evening so any glitches could be addressed quickly. Hendrick's group also bought several key words on search engines so that if viewers misspelled "Hendrick" or "Stewart" or another pertinent word, they could still get to the site.

Every state was represented by visitors to the site.

"This site has been three years in the making and it launched without any real promotion at all," said Gary Davis, chief operating officer of Hendrick Automotive Group. "The sponsorship gave us truly national exposure. Now we have a way of reaching consumers that we could have never reached before."