SAE Racing Loses Race Engineer?

[GTRMagic]

A component of the driver development package included in the HYL package is that a driver is required to bring a commercial sponsor to the table for 2 reasons, as a small cost offset to the total budget of the team, but more importantly, so that the driver begins to learn the demands of various sponsors, the public relations experience is gained, dealing with the media etc etc such that when they go on their next step to different teams, the ground work has already been covered.

This is exactly how the HYL program ran as long ago as 1997 when the dozens of candidates were whittled down to 5....

[TheGspot]

Well put GTR, It appears that the programme works thus far

[CooperS79]

So would something like $350,000 get you a full year or just a few rounds??

[GTRMagic]

Do you have $350,000?? :confused:

See this is the thing that gets people confused... the mindset regarding anyone contributing anything to a team to secure a drive seems to be that they write a cheque out of their own bank account and the money is just a spend as opposed to a marketing leverage.

If you look at any person who introduces a sponsor to a team, there can be many aims of the program, to get the brand name on the car is the most obvious one, and for example if the sponsor has a preferred driver, then they may get the driving gig on the strength of the nod from the sponsor. This would be if the sponsorships are in the high 6, low 7 figure regions anyway.

So if a sponsor pays to be on the car, there is no way that they would utilise a benevolent society mindset and not want something back for their investment. Makes no commercial sense at all.

For example, Caltex is on the side of the SBR Falcons, and Russell Ingall is their primary marketing vehicle (haha) for that sponsorship. Having said that, just because Caltex might think Russell is a good bloke, they wont just pay millions of dollars to a team and get Russell a drive without getting any other return for the deal.

Motorsport, marketing & advertising generally doesnt work like that....