Denny Hamlin diagnoses issues with NASCAR that 'make it difficult' to land sponsors

Denny Hamlin opened up about NASCAR landing sponsors and keeping them in the sport. On the Actions Detrimental podcast, the three-time Daytona 500 winner revealed the issues that “make it difficult” to land sponsors for 23XI Racing, including “staying power.”

“I think that the only people that have the staying power in our sport for forever and ever is Penske and Hendrick, and it’s why they probably win the bulk of the races,” Hamin said. “[Joe] Gibbs, you can definitely throw in there as well, but there’s the only ones that can sustain their sponsorship because of the B2B that they leverage to get that sponsorship. No one else really has that ability to do that, so it makes everyone else so fragile, which makes them hard to invest, which makes it hard to perform. It’s just a snowball that happens in this business that makes it extremely difficult.”

Before those comments, Hamlin talked about what Tony Stewart had to say on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, including landing sponsors. He said there were “so many Fortune 500 companies” looking to sponsor a car 10-15 years ago.

Denny Hamlin shares more on NASCAR sponsorships

“If you have some sponsorship media dollars that you want to spend within your company, there’s so many avenues that you can use it for now,” Hamlin said. …There’s a lot of different things that you can use to target your audience. But NASCAR has a really strong core fan base that really supports the sponsors that participate in it. So there’s still lots of great value there.

“But what Tony is saying is that if you don’t have a manufacturer deal, which they ended up losing based off of performance and then you start to lose sponsors, it’s going downhill. You’re not going to be able to sustain.”

While Hamlin knows landing and maintaining sponsors is challenging, 23XI does have strong partners, including McDonald’s Walmart, Dr. Pepper and the Jordan Brand since Michael Jordan co-owns 23XI Racing with Hamlin. The team is having a strong season as one of their drivers, Tyler Reddick, won the regular season championship and has qualified for the Cup Series championship race.