Hustles, Promotion & Getting Paid
Everybody Had an Angle
Race cars are expensive.
They were expensive when racers built them in small garages, hauled them on open trailers and slept in the tow vehicle. They became considerably more expensive once everybody discovered that going faster required better parts, more engines and a longer trip next weekend.
Winning helped.
Getting paid before the race helped even more.
That was where the hustlers came in.
Pick Your Hustle: Snake vs. Mongoose | Hot Wheels Dragsters | The Jungle Jim Show | The Match-Race Hustle | Bill Doner
Some racers learned to sell a rivalry. Some sold a nickname. Some turned a Funny Car into a traveling attraction that promoters wanted badly enough to pay appearance money whether it won or not.
Then somebody convinced a toy company to sponsor two drag racers and discovered that the toys could sell the race cars while the race cars sold the toys.
At that point racing wasn’t just about finding horsepower. It was about finding somebody willing to pay for it.
The best promoters understood the same thing from the other side of the fence. Give the crowd two recognizable names, a little smoke, a little noise and something they hadn’t seen before, and there was a fair chance the ticket window would stay busy.
Tom McEwen understood that Don Prudhomme being faster wasn’t necessarily a problem if enough people would pay to watch him try to beat the Snake.
Most sponsors put their name on the race car. Mattel went a little farther and helped decide what the race cars looked like.
Jungle Jim understood something simple: the promoter was paying for the crowd, not merely the elapsed time.
The national events got the headlines. Jungle Jim figured out that the road between them could pay a lot of the bills.
Bill Doner didn’t merely promote drag races. He kept asking what else he could put on the bill to make somebody buy a ticket.
Bottom Line
Racing likes to remember horsepower.
Horsepower costs money.
That made the fellow who could sell tickets, attract sponsors or turn his own name into an attraction nearly as valuable as the fellow who could build the engine.
McEwen sold a rivalry.
Mattel sold toys and helped finance race cars.
Jungle Jim sold Jungle Jim.
Bill Doner sold whatever would get people through the gate.
Everybody had an angle.
The good ones figured out how to make the crowd enjoy paying for it.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Renegotiates the Appearance Money