Continuing its strategy of using sports sponsorships to help remove itself from the shadow of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices announced last week a multiyear deal to become the official technology partner of NASCAR.
Neither George Pyne, NASCAR COO, nor Morris Denton, AMD vice president of global corporate marketing, offered details, but industry insiders said the company is likely committing $20 million over the next four years to improve competition and enhance the safety of NASCAR participants.
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| AMD partnered with Lance Armstrong’s team in 2003 to help in the design of Trek bicycles. |
AMD will assist with timing and scoring, research and development, wind-tunnel testing and crash simulation, Denton said. Starting next year, AMD also will create mobile timing-and-scoring command centers capable of processing more than a half-million data points per race and will send these units to each Nextel Cup, Busch and Craftsman Truck series race.
Pyne said NASCAR traditionally has handled all of its timing, scoring, research and development in-house, but it has been looking to add a technology partner for “quite some time.”
“We’ve done it out of necessity,” Pyne said. “But we’ve got all kinds of data that needs to be processed and reprocessed.”
Adding a non-endemic brand such as AMD has become common for NASCAR and continues to prove its ability to attract top sponsors, but Pyne credits the addition of series sponsor Nextel as the impetus for opening the door to other tech companies.
“When the technology comes into NASCAR and it works … their success is going to breed new success, and that’s why we have AMD,” he said. “Now we hope AMD does the same with others.”
For AMD, the sponsorship provides an opportunity to win new business and close the gap on Intel, which has 85 percent of the microprocessor market share, compared with 9 percent for AMD.
Intel has a large advantage, at least in the corporate desktop market, because of its exclusive partnership with Dell. AMD, which has a $9.9 billion market capitalization, counts IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems as its partners.
“We’re always interested in taking market share and taking dollars, but we haven’t set aside a specific target for what we anticipate to drive on a (business-to-business) level out of NASCAR,” Denton said.
AMD will focus in year one on implementing its technology where needed, but Denton said he expects to activate with hospitality and other “at-track efforts.” AMD has retained Just Marketing in Indianapolis.
“Because this is a multiyear agreement, we aren’t trying to hit the ball out of the ballpark in the first year,” he said.
It might seem strange for AMD to be spending money in sports, but the company has been doing just that for several years.
In 2003, AMD partnered with now seven-time Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong and his pro cycling team to help with design of its Trek bicycles. The company has strong ties in motorsports, last month adding the FIA, Formula One’s governing body, to its F1 portfolio that includes the Scuderia Ferrari and Sauber Petronas teams.
“The core of those relationships are built on how our technology can be used as a source of competitive advantage or differentiation” Denton said. “It’s important for us to find a similar relationship with a NASCAR team that provides us with that sort of credible expression.”
AMD is contractually obligated to commit money to a team after the first year of the league deal.
