| | Associated Press
It's called a plain white wrapper -- no sponsorship -- and when a race car looks that way, it usually means the racer won't be around much longer.
Johnny Benson and James Ince bucked that trend for a while, but if they didn't come up with some green, their surprisingly good season would have been history.
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Aaron Rents rescues Benson
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ATLANTA -- Johnny Benson, one of the surprises of the 2000 NASCAR Winston Cup season, will be able to finish the season,
thanks to a sponsorship agreement reached with Atlanta-based Aaron
Rents.
Benson, 16th in the Winston Cup point standings, and his MB2 Motorsports team had said they would be forced to shut down after
Saturday's Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway if financial backing for the remainder of the season could not be
found.
MB2, owned by Atlanta residents Read Morton, Tom Beard and Nelson Bowers, purchased Benson's team from Tim Beverly on July 20. Pending final approval, Valvoline has signed on as a sponsor for 2001.
The agreement with Aaron Rents covers the final 15 races of this season, starting with the Brickyard 400.
"This opportunity with Johnny Benson happened quite by accident," said Mike Hickey of Aaron Rents. "We saw a newspaper
article last week about the team needing a sponsor. We got on the phone and one thing led to another."
Lycos sponsored Benson through the season's first 16 events before a contract dispute ended that association.
Not much was expected from Benson this season after he signed with Beverly's unheralded team. But he nearly pulled off an upset
in the Daytona 500, leading NASCAR's biggest race until the final four laps, and he finished a career-best second in the Food City
500 at Bristol, Tenn., in March.
-- Associated Press
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"We've had teams with big sponsors come up and say we're making them look bad, that they've got all the money in the world and we've got none and we're still running pretty good," Benson said.
That's an understatement. In the big-bucks world of NASCAR, where top sponsorship is peaking at close to $15 million per season, driver Benson and crew chief Ince are 16th in the Winston Cup standings but last in assets. That changed Tuesday when Atlanta-based Aaron Rents agreed to sponsor the team for the rest of the season.
But running without a sponsor was nothing new for Benson's team. It was that way when they began the season five moths ago, when Benson very nearly stole the Daytona 500. But for an inconvenient caution flag and no drafting partners near the end, he might have pulled it off.
That got the attention of some marketers, and along came a sponsor. But in a few months, the checks stopped arriving and the logo came off the Pontiac. They then went back to living on hope and deferred payments on engines, chassis and tires.
"We have essentially had nothing to race with this season," said Ince, at 29 the youngest crew chief on the circuit. "Our sponsors have been our vendors, Hopkins chassis, Hendrick engines and even Goodyear."
And he has a 37-year-old driver who was never considered much more than a journeyman, whose claim to fame was driving the fifth car in racing mogul Jack Roush's five-car garage. But often these days, the only plain white car in fields of 43 can be seen racing among the multicolored vehicles of some of the wealthy teams in the sport.
Most recently, at Pocono International Raceway, Benson finished 12th in the Pennsylvania 500, beating lucrative entries backed by such sponsors as Tide, McDonald's and Kodak.
Somebody should tell Benson to go to rear of the field where he belongs, take his mobile billboard off the TV screen because he has nothing to peddle.
That may not have been a problem after Saturday. Ince said the Brickyard 400 --NASCAR's second-biggest race -- might have been the end for this season.
"We definitely (had) stretched a nickel farther than most people could," he said.
But Ince and Benson, both of whom are signed through 2003, feel good about the future because their Tyler Jet Motorsports team was sold last week to MB2 Motorsports, which fields M&M's-backed Pontiacs for Ken Schrader. Jay Frye, general manager for MB2, says sponsorship is in place for 2001, but won't elaborate.
A cessation of operations usually means defection of a crew, in this case one Benson says is a large part of the reason for his success. But he's didn't seemed worried even prior to Tuesday's sponsorship deal.
"We can afford to keep the team together and we can afford to build race cars," he said. "We just can't afford to keep going to races."
The purchase by MB2 is certain to improve the outlook for Schrader and Benson, a non-winner in 146 starts over five Winston Cup seasons. They will be able to share information, a great asset in a sport where no single-car team has won since 1998.
Schrader, who has four career victories, but none since 1991, is excited about having Benson as a teammate.
"I think as a single-car team it is a ton harder to accomplish what a good two-car team can," said Schrader, who is 17th in the standings. "When you look around out there at teams, that one has really run good.
"They've had enough adversity to deal with this year and still performed good."
Frye says everybody on both teams is excited about the deal.
"It's almost like Mom and Dad bringing home a new baby brother," he said.
How much farther the baby could have crawled this year will remain a mystery. But it's certainly expected to be walking on its own in another seven months, when the 2001 season opens at Daytona.
Maybe then, Benson will have a drafting partner to help out when the others line up against him. | |
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