Just throwing out an idea

[call_me_andrew]

So I find this offbeat piece on CNN.com and I get to thinking, "Could such an idea work for a race team?"

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/01/30/ntm.my.football.club.cnn

There are a lot of obsticles in place of course. How many investors can you find? How much per share? Are there dividends to pay? Does the value of a share change? How much would the initial purchase cost?

That team was bought for £700,000 (that's just over US$1 million). I don't know how much the initial purchase is, but I know the operating costs are about $5 million/year/car.

[Jag_Warrior]

I could have invested in a nudie bar in the D.C. area back in the 90's. I could (easily) see how that would have made money, but I didn't go for it - too many legal issues, IMO. But other than the "gee whiz" novelty factor of being able to say that I'm part owner of a racing team, I wouldn't expect to make the first dime. I've been pretty happy with my ISC shares over the years. But that's about the only "racing investment" (along with SMI, depending on when they were bought) that I can think of that's been a reasonably good investment.

My first question would be, how many teams within the series of choice actually turn a profit???

[El Libertador]

Been there, done that. In 2001-ish, Larry MacReynolds was involved with a NASCAR team that the fans were going to own. That never happened. I think a few other NASCAR Busch teams tried it, to. I don't know how much money they needed compared to IndyCar (but considering it was years ago, when NASCAR wasn't as expensive to do as it is now, I'm sure it was similar). With the unfortunate fact being NASCAR has a lot more popularity than IndyCar, if they couldn't get enough fans who wanted to own a team, I doubt you'll be able to do it, especially with your average race fan cutting back on spending.

[champcarray]

How about micro-sponsorship of a team? It's been done before, so I'm surprised teams don't make this a part of their standard operating procedure. I suppose the issue is whether the team wants to vet each sponsor to avoid less-than-desirable affiliates.

[philipbain]

I like the Dome team's idea at Le Mans that they have successfully used over the past few years, selling small areas of advertising, either white logos / text on a black background or black text / logos on a white background, the idea being that each space is sold at quite a low cost, but there are that many of them that the total sponsorship on the car pays for the team to race. Heres the result: http://cache.gettyimages.com/xc/848601.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=17A4AD9FDB9CF19390335F8FA9CA92A6D622A4361052FE56 A40A659CEC4C8CB6

Whether or not the same concept would work for Indycar i' m not sure, it's about finding enough companies wishing to be associated with a team to enhance thier image, if Indy is a good fit for enough companies then I think its a way forward.

[garyshell]

I was watching the Koni Challenge race from Daytons yesterday (replay). There was a Porsche that appeared to be COVERED with small stickers. I wonder if this was a variant of the same concept.

Gary

[ykiki]

Didn't Dean Hall run a few races in the mid-90s with Subway sponsorship financed by customers joining the Subway Fan Club? (With life-size cardboard cutouts of Dean in the Subway restaurants).