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Among the renewing sponsors that Team Penske will announce this week: Discount Tire (top), AutoZone and Hitachi, whose logo is sported by driver Helio Castroneves.
Photo by: COURTESY OF TEAM PENSKE (2)
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After celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2016, things are looking good for Team Penske heading into the next half century.
The team this week will announce renewals with at least six of its seven partnerships that expire in 2016, underscoring its continued strength amid occasionally tumultuous times in motorsports. The team, which was founded in 1965, will announce the news this week at a partner summit in Phoenix, site of this weekend’s NASCAR national series races.
The renewals come both from a longtime partner in PPG Industries, which has been with the team since 1983, and from newer partners in Discount Tire, AutoZone, Hitachi, Carlisle and Menards, all of which were signed this decade and the last of which was already revealed. The team also was finalizing one
other extension last week and wasn’t ready to announce it.
The renewals are for varying lengths and cover assets across NASCAR’s Sprint Cup and Xfinity series, Verizon IndyCar and Australia’s V8 Supercars series. For example, PPG has gotten involved with Team Penske’s relatively new Supercars operation, and the paint company will continue those assets as part of the extension.
Specific financial terms of the deals were not available, but a source valued most of the deals in the seven figures annually.
For Jonathan Gibson, Team Penske’s vice president of marketing and communications, extending the expiring deals comes down to a combination of consistent on-track performance mixed with a concerted effort to forge business-to-business connections, made possible in part because of the race team’s status as a subsidiary of owner Roger Penske’s Penske Corp.
“I feel like we’re really fortunate at Team Penske in that all of our partners have similar cultures,” said Gibson, whose team says it drives nine figures’ worth of B2B deals annually. “We’re sitting down every year with these partners and having these conversations, so when we get to renewal time, we already kind of know what’s moving the needle in their business.”
That culture, industry observers said, is built around aligning with traditional, process-driven companies, often in the automotive/mobility business, including the likes of Shell, MillerCoors, Verizon, Bosch and Snap-on. The team also is known for having competitive pricing; for example, sources said the team asks $15 million to $16 million annually for primary NASCAR Sprint Cup Series sponsorships, below the $20 million to $25 million that some of the other top teams ask.
AutoZone, which has been with the team since 2014 and has visibility on the C-post of Team Penske’s No. 22 Ford in the Cup series, is an example of an automotive company leveraging the connections Team Penske offers. On top of hosting thousands of customers at races annually, the company sells products to Penske Automotive Group’s dealerships for an amount that Brett Shanaman, AutoZone’s vice president of marketing, declined to reveal.
“We continue to find new ways to work together to take advantage of that connection,” said Shanaman, before adding by way of example: “We’re starting to find ways where Penske is now helping us with some technical aspects on some of our proprietary products.”
Rob Sharpe, vice president of sales and marketing for Hitachi Automotive Systems Americas, says his company’s deal allows the numerous subsidiaries of parent company Hitachi Limited to leverage the marketing rights available from Team Penske.
“They line us up for a lot of very unique and good opportunities and experiences — from the B2B all the way to the racetrack,” Sharpe said.
The extensions, combined with deals already obligated to go past 2016, leave Team Penske with limited open inventory heading into 2017. However, the team is considering starting a sports car operation, which would create new inventory.
