It's the morning before a Sprint Cup race, and the garage area is a beehive of activity. Crewmen tune engines, revving accelerators so high that it's necessary for passers-by to plug their ears. Fans stare at the colorful cars and transporters as if they're museum pieces, so many people cramming the area that they occasionally have to be shooed out of the way by team members hauling equipment or pushing race cars out to pit road. Lost in all the hubbub are the men in dress shirts bearing small team logos, who entertain guests in directors chairs under the shade of a gate lift or behind the mirrored rear doors of a trailer.

These are team executives, and to a degree, it's their job to make everything else about this NASCAR race day possible. It's their job to tout the strengths of their sport and their organization to those with marketing dollars to spend. It's their job to find the money that makes a race team go.

That quest never stops, not even after the NASCAR season ends later this month, and in the aftermath of a recession it's hampered by factors much larger than a single auto-racing series. No question, there are some positive signs out there -- the recession (at least officially) is over, many see an uptick in fan activity, some will tell you that NASCAR has hit the floor and has begun the slow crawl back up. But there are still some real fears out there, fears about a secondary recession or potential new regulations from Washington that can make it difficult to convince a gun-shy corporation to part with marketing funds. So no, it's not exactly morning in America again, even if some can glimpse the rays of first light.

"I feel like NASCAR is a little like unemployment -- when the recession stops, unemployment doesn't rebound immediately," said Ty Norris, executive vice president at Michael Waltrip Racing, where he's the point man on sponsor relations. "I think that because of the amount of money that is necessary to do business in this garage, it's not going to be a quick and immediate rebound. It's going to come, but it's going to lag behind recovery just like unemployment lags behind recovery. That's probably the challenge our sport has."

That's evident in much of the sponsor traffic in NASCAR today, which is essentially brands moving from one team to another -- such as Shell/Pennzoil moving from Richard Childress Racing to Penske Racing, Budweiser moving from Richard Petty Motorsports to RCR, and Mobil 1 moving from Penske to Stewart-Haas Racing. There have been a flurry of smaller deals, with companies coming in as associate sponsors. But the sport had gone without a new, big-splash, majority-season primary sponsor until last week, when the AARP Foundation's Drive for Hunger campaign signed on to back Jeff Gordon's car for 22 races in each of the next three years.

NASCAR used to see several of those types of deals, new companies coming in to back a car for a majority of the season, every year. Now, they're rare. "I've been here 21 years, and almost every year I've been here until 2008, there were at least three to five new primary sponsors that owned the whole car. Not just five races. We've seen none of that for two years," Geoff Smith, president of Roush Fenway Racing, said before the AARP deal was announced. "When that starts happening, it's big."

And yet, as big as it was, the Drive for Hunger sponsorship still left a 14-race gap to be filled by DuPont -- Gordon's primary sponsor for most of his career, which began to scale back its involvement this season -- and longtime associate Pepsi. For teams, the good news is that more companies appear willing to spend money than they were a year ago, when the effects of the recession were being felt full-force. The bad news is, those companies in most cases aren't able to spend at the $20-25 million level it takes to back a Chase-contending car, which means teams have to find more sponsors to fill in the blanks. These days, cars that have a single primary sponsor all season long are a rarity.

"I'd say we're having more conversations than we were having a year and a half ago, but in smaller increments," Norris said. "I think the amount of sponsorship dollars that are being discussed are less than what we could discuss two, three years ago, which means you have to have more volume in your conversations, because you have to have more companies involved. If your goal is $100 and all anybody wants to talk to you about is $15 or $20, then you need to get five or six people to get to $100. We have to have more conversations, because we're having conversations with smaller dollar amounts. That's the major challenge that we're in. I'd love to have one conversation for $100, not five conversations for $20, but that's not just the way the world works anymore."

It's still a brutally competitive atmosphere, one where teams will steal sponsors right out from underneath one another, made more challenging by the fact that it now typically takes so many sponsors to fill up a car. But with the recession over -- it is, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, an academic panel which officially marks the beginnings and ends of such things -- some deals are getting done. They may not be high-profile, but it's money coming in nonetheless. Earlier this year, MWR brought on smaller sponsors Monster Diesel and Tire Monkey. Hendrick Motorsports added Quaker State as a primary sponsor for four races on Mark Martin's car next year. SHR added Tornados to Ryan Newman's car. Every little bit helps.

"Let's face it, whether the deal you're doing is big or small, there's a lot of value in that. They tend to cost a pretty decent sum of money, whether it's half a million dollars or $5 million, whatever it may be. You've got to kind of take the approach that this is serious business and this is serious money, and I think everyone does," said Hendrick vice president Pat Perkins, who manages the team's sponsorship acquisitions.

Just be ready to answer more questions than ever before, given that no one is spending marketing money without a very good reason. "You just have to be prepared and you have to show some pretty strong statistical information about the sport, about your company, about your drivers, whatever, that's compelling and complementary to the discussions you're having," Perkins added. "And you have to be prepared to answer a lot of questions beyond that. ... There's a lot more follow-up and a lot more due diligence that I see in corporate America today verses two years ago or four years ago. They're like, look, we're going to analyze every decision we make, and we expect our properties to be a partner in that and help provide answers to whatever questions we're asking. That's what you have to do."

The parameters have changed, but even in the slow thaw of a post-recessionary period, sponsorship deals are being done. But there's more corporate money out there, billions of it, a gold mine of potential NASCAR sponsorships just waiting to happen. Now, if only team executives could only convince companies to spend it.

Uncertainty about taxes, unemployment and health care have forced businesses to hold onto money, instead of spending it on marketing.

Waiting on Washington

After months of pinching pennies and streamlining payroll, and thanks to low federal interest rates that have made borrowing easy, many U.S. companies are awash in cash. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a big-business advocacy group, nonfinancial companies were sitting on roughly $1.8 trillion in cash reserves as of mid-October. In some circles there's a drumbeat for companies to spend those reserves on job creation, and ease the unemployment rate. NASCAR teams would like to see some of it freed up for marketing purposes, which translates into sponsorships.

But they're not spending it, not yet. They're sitting on it, worried about a host of issues -- like potential new federal regulation, tax changes, and impacts of healthcare reform -- that stem from one place. NASCAR teams are waiting on companies that are waiting on Washington.

"[One] difficulty this recession recovery has is, the pervasive lack of confidence that corporations in particular have, the profound uncertainly that they have about the rules that government is going to impose on society, either on the form of taxation, in the form of continued entitlement spending, in traditional regulation," said Roush's Smith. "You're reading about how all the corporate money is being retained. One of the most obvious places to see that fact in motion is right here in the garage. These corporations, as healthy as they are, are reluctant to drop in three-year commitments and so forth in sponsorships."

They're reluctant because of things like the proposed "cap-and-trade" bill, currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, that would limit carbon emissions. They're reluctant about the still-unknown total costs of healthcare reform. They're reluctant about whether the recovery can be sustained. They're reluctant over potential changes to tax laws and new regulations. While it's no question the NASCAR garage typically skews Republican, concerns over this issue seem to have less to do with red or blue states than they do another color -- green.

"There are corporations right now that are sitting on billions of dollars. They are gun shy right now because they don't know what the tax rules are going to be, they don't know what the healthcare is going to look like, they don't even know what their cost of doing business is now. The challenge is greater to get a lot of those answers, and a lot of those answers are tied up with where we currently sit with the [Obama] administration," said MWR's Norris.

"So until all of that is identified, companies won't know truly what the cost of doing business is, how much money they can and need to put behind the innovation of their products, and ultimately how much they need to put behind the marketing of those products. It's not as if corporations don't have the money. They just don't want to spend now and get hit with unforeseen taxation or any of the other issues relative to their cost of doing business. I have faith that eventually people will have faith and trust and start marketing. NASCAR is still a phenomenal place to market. But there are just still way too many questions out there that need to be answered relative to what the administration will do."

But have those concerns led any companies to back away from a potential NASCAR sponsorship? Not at Hendrick, at least. "I will be perfectly candid with you and say, I have not had that specific discussion," Perkins said. "But it doesn't surprise me. Each company is different, and the organizations some of my colleagues have been talking to versus who I've been talking to, who knows how they operate or what they see happening. I think that's a case-by-case basis. I've heard it. But as far as that being a direct reason why deals get done or don't get done, I haven't specifically ever encountered that."

Yet there's no question the overarching concerns exist, and not just in NASCAR. Sponsorship agreements in other sports, particularly things like arena naming-rights deals that require NASCAR-sized financial commitments, have been hamstrung for the same reason, according to David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California.

"What's going on in NASCAR is a microcosm of what's happening in sports marketing, and what's happening in sports marketing is a microcosm of overall spending on marketing," Carter said. "Planning and corporate strategies going forward are uncertain, because no one is quite confident about the future of the economy, what's going to happen with healthcare, what's going to happen with taxes. That starts to impact cash sitting on the sidelines and corporations not hiring. It becomes difficult to justify, in some cases, high-profile sports marketing expenditures, and I would put NASCAR at a high level along with naming-rights deals and other high-profile relationships that have been very difficult to come by the last six months to a year."

Even sponsors already in the sport are affected. Smith said he's seen a reduction in corporate hospitality and sponsor activation among public companies afraid of more governmental regulation. He worries that major NASCAR sponsors with multinational interests may one day decide to take their marketing dollars elsewhere. "If corporations think you can't do those things without government repercussion," he said, "this investment becomes more difficult."

Will that change? Carter points to the stock market and this week's mid-term elections as two potential barometers of what he calls "medium-term" stability. Meanwhile, NASCAR team executives can only grit their teeth and wait for potential marketing cash to be freed up. "There are so many things that lead to this wait-and-see business we've got going on right now," Smith said. "That needs to release for us to have our rebound."

AARP became the first cause-related entity to sponsor a driver full-time in NASCAR due to their partnership with Jeff Gordon and Hendrick Motorsports.

Combing for categories

Brett Frood watches television for the commercials. The executive vice president at Stewart-Haas Racing, who oversees the organization's hunt for sponsorship, uses TV as a guide to help him determine which companies and industries are doing a lot of marketing -- and which might need to do more.

"We'll call it low-hanging fruit," said Frood, who holds degrees from Brown and Harvard. "If there are companies out there that are spending a ton of money on media buys, and looking like they have allocated quite a bit to marketing, then certainly we're going to approach them, and tell them the story of NASCAR, tell them the story of Stewart-Haas Racing and our respective drivers. It doesn't mean we aren't going after all those companies that aren't spending money on media, too, because there are certainly opportunities on that end. ... But at the end of the day, if I'm watching someone who's spent a ton on commercials, then yeah, that would be on our target list."

Finding sponsorship, particularly at the level it takes to fund a top-tier NASCAR program, is never easy. In an economy still hindered by recession, in a business climate where corporations are hoarding cash like an old maid storing money under a mattress, it becomes even more of a challenge. The basics -- working the phones, building relationships, finding the right matches, providing a high level of service to sponsoring companies -- are as important now as they've ever been. But so is foresight, an ability to see trends and get an idea of which businesses or industries are most ripe for the picking.

To many in the NASCAR garage, that means looking at categories. The sport is full of direct competitors -- Lowe's and Home Depot, Budweiser and Miller, Kellogg's and Cheerios -- and it's not unusual for one company to enter NASCAR and eventually be followed by its rivals. It happened a decade ago with dot-com companies, it happened more recently with spirits, and it's happening now with energy drinks. One company coming in can spur a wave of business. You want to find a sponsor? Make a guess as to what the next category of business to enter NASCAR will be, and start making phone calls.

Of course, it's not that easy. "That's the $780 million question," MWR's Norris said. "Not only does it have to be the right emerging company or category, it also has to be a company with a chief marketing officer who in this era is willing to take the leap. A lot of times, that doesn't happen. Sometimes it has to happen with a very nimble company that has like one owner and a board. These are start-up companies, and sometimes those are risky. They take capital investors, and they either make it or they don't. And if they make it, they make it big, or they fly through here like the wind. I think you're seeing more smaller, lesser-known companies come by who are more entrepreneurial than they are S&P 500s."

When Hendrick's Perkins first became involved in NASCAR, his approach toward sponsor development was simply to call everyone. "I was like a shotgun," he said. "I'd go down a list and just start calling." Over time, he learned that to be more efficient, he needed to refine his search by concentrating on categories of companies, and becoming thoroughly familiar with what their marketing needs were. Hendrick has made successful inroads in industries like beverages, electronics, and automotive-related fields as a result.

"You have to really immerse yourself in a category, immerse yourself in how you're going to make it fit, and concentrate on that for a while," Perkins said. "Pick one, and really try to understand the value proposition there."

The AARP Foundation's Drive for Hunger campaign, which will back Gordon's No. 24 car at Hendrick beginning next year, is the first cause-related entity to enter NASCAR as a majority sponsor. Could that be the vanguard of a new category? "Maybe," Perkins said. "I think certainly, they're one of the first to put a big flag in the ground and say, OK, we're going to make this a long-term commitment and a piece of our awareness and fundraising and partnership campaigns. So I think sure, I think it has a lot of opportunity to maybe bring in others, and maybe open up a new line of opportunity in the sport. We'll see."

It takes a broad viewpoint. At Stewart-Haas, Frood evaluates ads not just on television, but also in periodicals like Sports Illustrated and the New York Times, combing for small nuggets that might give him a glimpse at a bigger picture. Just as goings-on in Washington affect NASCAR teams searching for sponsorship, so do ebbs and flows within individual industries, all of it part of a larger macroeconomic cycle that trickles down into stock-car racing.

"You can't just focus on, who would look good on the side of a race car? It's, what industries out there are potentially striving, which are potentially struggling, and really understanding the holistic economic climate," Frood said. "That's going to dictate our mining process, so to speak. Are there companies out there that are clearly, clearly, spending money? Are their industries out there that are thriving, and companies that aren't spending money that should? I believe that the diligence process and the business acumen of all of us, certainly not just at Stewart-Haas but in the industry as a whole, has been enhanced ... to try and find the right partners for the sport."

While finding new full-time sponsors is difficult, the fact remains many companies have remained in NASCAR full-time.

Finding the floor

NASCAR has been through something like this before, and fairly recently. The financial crisis that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sent the economy into a tailspin, and NASCAR felt the painful results. Sponsors pulled back or pulled out of the sport; some teams scaled back operations or went out of business; starting fields were rounded out by cars there to pick up a check rather than to try and win the race. The central issue, then as now, was uncertainty.

"Every [sponsor] we were talking to in the fall of that year, stopped," Roush's Smith remembered. "We were on hold, because the country was in a period of uncertainty. Those businesses didn't know if we were going to have a giant army in a major war and maybe they'd have to go sponsor the USO show somewhere. They stopped. It was a relatively long period, through the winter. Normally when we got to Daytona, there'd always been last-minute shoppers or people starting to look for the next year. It wasn't there in Daytona in 2002. But you've got to watch the mood of the country. That affects this. We're a microcosm of the whole United States."

Of course, judging the mood of an entire country is a difficult thing to do, particularly when unemployment remains at 9.6 percent. But talking to people in the garage area, you get a sense that NASCAR event attendance -- while still far short of selling out most Sprint Cup venues -- is bouncing back. Smith was in Las Vegas recently, and said the city, one of the hardest-hit in America by the recession, was much more alive than it was when the series stopped there for its race weekend in February. Some sponsor deals are getting done. The vast majority of existing sponsors have stayed, a show of faith that's been overshadowed by so much negative news.

"One good indicator is, you don't see people along this row wanting to bail," Smith said, pointing down a row of sponsor-colored team transporters in the garage. "But they do want to reduce their spending. That means [NASCAR sponsorship] is working, but it may be working at a different level than they need, and they need to work with less. That's a positive thing."

In some camps, there's a feeling that hasn't been present in some time: optimism.

"The environment has certainly started to get better," Hendrick's Perkins said. "Fundamentally, I think it has changed a little bit. Certainly the excitement is there. When you start to look across the landscape, I sit back and think, we've been able to be pretty successful. We've talked to a lot of new companies looking into the sport. We've done a couple of deals here recently ... so there's kind of new life coming into it. And the companies that have been here for a long time continue to see value in it. They may have to change some of their priorities or change some of their commitments, but as long as they're flexible and I think practical, there's room to grow and get things done."

It all leads to a natural question: from a recessionary standpoint, has NASCAR found the floor? Has the sport hit bottom and begun the crawl back up? Even amid some positive signs, it's difficult to tell. The saga involving Richard Petty Motorsports, which is besieged by debt and will contract from four to two cars for next year -- if it returns at all -- offers a clear reminder that for some organizations, economic and sponsorship crises still exist. And then there are the teams that struck sponsorship deals before the recession began, and face the possibility of renewing for far less.

"We're not out of it," said Stewart-Haas' Frood. "I think we're still in a contractionary period, and corporate America is being very conscious of their budget decisions and their spending and how they are shaping their strategy, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. The ebbs and flows, when you look at the historic economy, you have these time periods. At the end of the day, when you kind of get out of it, you have better companies and stronger companies for it. A lot of times, companies that don't survive these times are the ones that weren't able to become efficient and develop better practices. I don't necessarily see that as a negative."

Sponsors aren't the only ones that have been forced to adjust during this period. Race teams have, too. The majority carry far less payroll than they did before the recession started, and the result is a far leaner garage area. Teams have learned that they can still function and compete even with the reduced manpower, a lesson organizations will almost certainly carry with them even after the economy begins to improve.

"Structurally, you'll be surprised by what you can actually get accomplished when you're pushed in a corner to do it," said MWR's Norris. "The way I look at it is, every corporation had to trim fat. Identifying fat and muscle was the distinguisher between whether you were successful or not. If you could truly trim the fat and get to the muscle, as long as you didn't degrade the muscle and you weren't a strong company anymore ... that's what we did. We trimmed down, and went wow, we're just as functional as we were. In fact, we've now become almost more efficient because we have fewer layers."

The end of the last recession, the one that began in late 2001, brought with it a period of tremendous growth for NASCAR. A new manufacturer (Toyota) entered the sport's top series, and for a time there were more fully-funded cars than there were starting spots on race days. The start-and-park crowd retreated, at least for a little while. New sponsors came in. Many facilities enjoyed sellout crowds. NASCAR soared, at least for a little while, until this current recession brought it back down to earth.

There are no guarantees that will happen again. But even now, there are some cracks in the recessionary ice. Even now, there are hopes that NASCAR has weathered the worst of the storm.

"I believe we are making our way out of it," Frood said. "I'm hopeful and confident that corporate America will start to free up some of that cash they've had in reserve to become more aggressive and tale advantage of the opportunity to position themselves in front of the competition. And I do believe that the product we have in the sport, the value is still incredibly high. It's just a matter of timing, of when companies are ready to get aggressive and push forward. I certainly think we're past the floor, so to speak. But we need to keep charging."

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