The news that Red Bull is going to pull out of NASCAR and leave its team to find other partners has led to the suggestion that the Austrian drinks company will probably be spending its US motorsport budget on something else – and the suggestion is that this will be as the title sponsor of the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin. The team was costing Red Bull around $35-40 million a year and this would easily cover a naming deal for the US race. The company has never been into trackside signage but such a deal would no doubt include other promotional opportunities. Red Bull is the sponsor of the US Grand Prix and the Indianapolis GP in the MotoGP world and one can imagine that the logic is the same. The company currently sells 4.1 billion cans of drink each year, with the US market soaking up around a quarter of that production.
The theory makes sense. It’s not hard to imagine that the bang for buck would be much better having the Circuit of the Americas named the Red Bull Circuit of the Americas, than an arguably under performing NASCAR team.
The other problem with NASCAR for Red Bull is that their competitors get so much exposure. The winner “sprays” Gatorade in victory lane, and every driver that gets an interview is drinking a Coke or a Pepsi. Red Bull kind of gets drowned out.
Not to mention the fact that Toyota is renown for cars driven by cardigan wearers and simply doesn’t have the muscle car heritage of Ford, Chevy and Dodge – this really wasnt a good fit for their high energy bran imo.
Red Bull was always an outsider in NASCAR and never likely to overcome that in a hurry. Getting into bed with Toyota didn’t help matters much (both too ‘furren’) and neither did its driver selection process – Kasey Kahne’s the first sensible signing, albeit too little too late.
Spending tons of money on becoming the public face of F1 in the USA – a sport about which Middle America cares not a fig – looks no less optimistic than Red Bull’s misadventures in NASCAR to me. The motorbikes make sense as that’s got a far greater American following (who don’t particularly want Bernie’s metaphorical Armani suit).
Consolidating its extreme sports and aviation sponsorships would be much more sensible.
So much for the old line, “we’re racers we want to race”.
I think F1 could and eventually will be big in the US. It’s mainly down to marketing and more US based races – which if the sport had some centralised control, or at least direction, it’d have in no time. I don’t think F1 will replace the US motor categories by any means, but it’ll do well in 5 years time I think. There’s a lot of rather insulting talk about americans just not ‘getting’ complex sports – but hell, I watch NFL and Americans love their strategy, teams, defence/offence, characters, technical elements, slow moving/fast moving sports.
Red Bull getting into the US on the vanguard of F1 is pretty sensible I’d say. They have most of the ‘extreme’ youth sports sorted out already – just market F1 as a cross between the strategic ups and downs of NFL football and an extreme motor racing system and they’ll get a big audience. Certainly more than the Middle-Eastern countries vanity races anyway.
Red Bull sponsors (owns?) a pro soccer team in the US, appealing to the more internationally-minded here. I think the USGP would be a great venue for them.
I tend to agree w/Nicko. I live in San Francisco, where “extreme” sports are forever popular and Red Bull has a natural audience. We have had the Red Bull Soapbox Derby race, and of course there are the air races as well. I do not know anyone (at least here in San Francisco) who mentions Red Bull’s F1 team (because F1 has very little presence), or even the NASCAR team (because the team’s results don’t justify it). Red Bull marketing in the US does not refer to F1 or MotoGP, and we even have a Red Bull-sponsored MotoGP event an hour from home! We have commercials for Red Bull Motocross riders, and the air shows. But F1 and Moto GP do not figure into the equation. No one here has ever bought a Red Bull because of Seb, Kahne, Speed, or Vickers.
[...] Source: http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/red-bull-and-america/ [...]
As usual Joe you come up with news before many others…
It’s makes complete sense that Red Bull would this. The news just gets better concerning the USGP…
Jeremy
It has not happened yet!
Personally I don’t think this would give them the exposure they are getting in NASCAR. For starters, the amount of Americans watching the race will be far less. For another, this is one race, as opposed to an entire season. Take that amount of Americans, the target marketing group, and multiply it by the amount of races on the calendar. Of course, the USGP will attain a huge television audience world wide. That however, isn’t drawing the market that they are catering to in this case, but rather that of their two F1 teams, Red Bull and Torro Rosso. If this should happen, I’d be happy to see it. However, I’d also approach Red Bull about taking over as the Director of US Advertising if it does.
[...] at the braking zone will be five cars wide to encourage overtaking and alternative lines.”Red Bull and America (Joe Saward)“The news that Red Bull is going to pull out of NASCAR and leave its team to find other [...]
[...] The news that Red Bull is going to pull out of Nascar and leave its team to find other partners has led to the suggestions that the Austrian drinks company will probably be spending its US motorsport budget on something else – and the suggestion is that this will be as the title sponsor of the United States Grand Prix which is due to return to the calendar in 2012.Full story: Joe Saward's Grand Prix blog [...]
[...] und, dass der Termin vielleicht an das Saisonende 2011 verschoben werden könnte. Joe Saward spekuliert derweil, dass Red Bull mit dem in der NASCAR ab 2012 gesparten Geld Titelsponsor der US Grand Prix [...]
[...] Red Bull and America (Joe Saward) [...]
[...] Source: http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/red-bull-and-america/ [...]