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Merchandise deals fall in place as NASCAR adjusts to trackside departure of Fanatics

The management team of driver Chase Elliott is considering whether to handle the driver’s merchandise sales in-house.Getty Images

NASCAR, its teams and tracks are going back to the era of having different merchandisers after an unsuccessful attempt at finding an industrywide solution to replace Fanatics.

 

Fanatics this year terminated its trackside deal with the NASCAR industry six years early (though it is keeping its NASCAR.com relationship), and executives in the sport have been scrambling to line up a replacement by the time the 2019 season begins at Daytona.

 

The Fanatics deal started in 2015 and brought most of the industry under the same vendor umbrella. Now NASCAR, teams and tracks are making individual decisions on who to partner with since striking another industrywide deal proved too complicated on such short notice.

 

On the league side, NASCAR will partner with SMI Properties, the merchandising subsidiary of track operator Speedway Motorsports Inc., to transport and operate its handful of haulers around the country for NASCAR’s 38-race schedule.

 

On the track side, International Speedway Corp. is partnering with MainGate to run merchandise operations at its 12 venues. SMI, which controls eight speedways, will of course continue using its SMI Properties subsidiary for its inside-the-gates operations, as it did during the Fanatics era. Legends was another company that had spoken with track operators about replacing Fanatics, sources say.

 

SMI Properties has pitched its services to teams and is likely to land with several, although others are expected to choose different vendors. Teams that share merchandise alliances, such as the arrangement between JR Motorsports and Hendrick Motorsports, may do joint deals.

 

“We were encouraged by the amount of world-class companies interested in partnering on a unified trackside licensing model,” Paul Sparrow, NASCAR’s managing director of licensing and consumer products, said in a prepared statement. “By the end of the process, NASCAR and the industry had multiple options to choose from and we collectively decided to move in a new direction.”

 

Sparrow added that SMI Properties’ “experience in motorsports and knowledge of our fan base set them apart from other suitors.”

 

ISC COO Joie Chitwood III praised what MainGate will bring to the track operator. The company has more than five decades of motorsports experience.

 

“As we look ahead to the 2019 season, MainGate will debut its footprint at Daytona and this holistic model will not only be familiar to our fans, but engage customers with a renewed energy that will only improve the at-track retail experience,” Chitwood said in a prepared statement.

 

While the 11th-hour scramble is likely to lead to some late nights for team executives over the next couple months, the situation is likely to be resolved enough by the start of the season that fans will notice no effect when they visit tracks.

 

“We’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg,” Joe Mattes, vice president of marketing and licensing of JR Motorsports, said of the work to replace Fanatics. “Each team had to explore different options and waited to see if there was going to be an industry solution or not. … We are so far behind now, the work in front of us is pretty monumental.”

 

In another scenario, the management team of Hendrick Motorsports driver Chase Elliott is said to be mulling the idea of handling his trackside merchandise sales in-house. Elliott has replaced Dale Earnhardt Jr. as both the sport’s most popular driver and, accordingly, its top merchandise sales performer. Fanatics this past season started bringing a second hauler to tracks for Elliott gear, which was up twelvefold over last season as of late August.

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