More of the Worst Sponsors, Team Owners, & Track Promoters in NASCAR History

at the midway point of the 2019 season trouble suddenly struck the teams of Joe Gibbs Racing and extreme concept incorporated their primary sponsor I canine abruptly missed a payment and the decals and banners on their cars and haulers came off just as things were starting to get under way at the July Daytona race however just a few hours later the team scrambled to put the logos back up where they belonged as it turned out the driver slated to start the races there at the track and the Xfinity in the Cup Series Jeffrey Earnhardt had backed out of his contract with ik9 out of the blue I canine is a dog training service that prepares service dogs for police other official contractors and the disabled with that pretty slim market it wouldn't have been too surprising if I canine missed their payments due to lack of funds but as soon as Jeffrey Earnhardt skipped town they were good and made their payment what had happened was Jeffrey had signed with jgr and xci to run races for them in the top two divisions on the promise that he'd be promoted to a full-time Cup ride in 2020 but when Christopher Belle's name started getting slung around for that Jeffrey backed out and dropped all of his sponsorship obligations immediately now with no driver xci and I canine understandably halted their plans jgr scrambled to find replacement drivers but the damage had been done xci ceased its cut program after just one start at Talladega just a few months prior and I canine massively scaled down his sponsorship obligations for 2020 this time a driver not a sponsor had torpedoed in an organization a reversal of the usual course of events but while we're on the topic let's explore some of the worst sponsors team owners and track promoters in NASCAR history [Music] this video is sponsored by raid shadow ledge how do you go in there for a second didn't I know but for real though this video is supported by Nord VPN and viewers like you via patreon thank you guys so much sponsorships are the lifeblood of NASCAR without them we wouldn't be able to fund the big advancements we've made in the sport we'd still be stuck on dirt and racing would look like this well now that actually looks pretty cool to me anyway the point is we're able to put on races across the country and hurtle around in state-of-the-art facilities at ridiculous speeds because big companies want to get their name out there and hood space on a mean-looking v8 monster is pretty tempting real estate but in everyone's haste to sell off body panels and naming rights to the highest bidder sometimes near to will slip through the cracks trying to get cloud or just some free advertising sponsorships are built on trust and unfortunately some people come along and abuse that trust for their own ends and then more often than not just bafflingly drop off the face of the earth shortly after they've been caught Mark Martin almost had his entire career nixed in his rookie season after a patchy stove agreed to sponsor him full time in 1982 and then just never paid him a dime you might think that a wood-burning stove company stepping up and spending tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor a NASCAR Cup Series team was odd but they had sponsor Terry Labonte and his rookie campaign just three years prior mark and owner driver and a partnership with Bud Reader took the deal and then once the checks bounced scrambled to find funding taking money from anyone who wanted some cheap advertising midway through the season Mark had everyone he knew begging him to drop out of the series and cut his losses his debts were mounting and he was going to end up broke but mark stubbornly continued on if he could just win the Rookie of the Year award then the cash prize at the end of the year would pay for everything and he'd be good however after a late season collapse failing to finish five of the last eight races Geoff Bodine pulled away and ended up with the check in the ticket to the year-end banquet at the Waldorf Astoria now severely in debt and with no other sponsors knocking on the door mark sold off his share of the team and started over from scratch in 1983 he signed with Jim Stacey and drove for him for the first seven races of the season before parting ways with him too why well Jim Stacey wasn't paying him either Mark Martin quit his dreams of being a NASCAR star after the 1984 season and dropped back to the Midwestern center de sá series but as we all know he'd be back in a big way once the 90s rolled around so let's talk about Jim JT Stacey by 1983 the California real estate mogul had become quite notorious for just not paying people he worked with in 1981 he had bought rod Osterlund number two team with star driver and defending champion Dale Earnhardt however Dale was the first to get bit by JD's nefarious ways and defected over to Richard Childress Racing after that you probably know how well that turned out for him after that JD went to a two car operation and proceeded to have a revolving door of drivers big and small come through his shop Jim Sauter Joe Ruttman Morgan Shepherd Tim Richmond and many others some got paid some didn't okay so he was a reckless car on her big whoop right well that wasn't the only way he made it to screw people over he had a pension almost an addiction to sponsoring as many cars as he could in any given race he just loved seeing his name plastered everywhere to be fair I mean who doesn't though right in the 1982 Daytona 500 he sponsored no less than seven entries and sometimes he would bring that count as high as eight but as the season dragged on he became more and more spotty with his payments and eventually found himself in legal trouble as it turned out the real estate market over in California was imploding and he was losing money fast honest team owners like Harry Rainier joonie Don La Vie and Billy Hagen who had been fixers in the sport for over a decade found themselves struggling to meet their basic payments after JD's checks bounced and they'd struggle for the rest of the decade and eventually bail out by the time the 90s rolled around everywhere he went JD Stacy seemed to kill everything he touched he sold his team before the 1984 season kicked off and dipped out of the sport entirely almost as suddenly as he had come in while a bad sponsorship deal can kill a career in the cradle it can also send a legendary driver into retirement well before his time Darrell Waltrip had unknowingly won his final race of his career at the southern 500 in 1992 and struggled to keep pace with the field as an owner driver throughout the 90s at the end of the 1997 season his longtime sponsor Western Auto had backed out and he was looking for a new one to foot the bill speed block a brand of fast-setting concrete stepped up and DW quickly agreed to their terms in a handshake deal he made the first five races of 1998 sporting their colors but then he found out that it's always better to have a multi-million dollar sponsorship deal in writing speed block never sent him a single check now in six-figure debt in his best year behind him Darrell sold his beloved team and all of his assets to Tyler Beverly who merged it with international sports management another team Beverly had bought but unbeknownst to either of them they had just inflamed the tensions in the infamous Tabasco fiasco from the previous entry in this series eventually in a cruel twist of fate Tyler Beverly's new team Tyler jet Motorsports tapped Darryl Waltrip to drive what were essentially his old cars however going into the 2000 season Tyler needed a new driver and a new sponsor Johnny Benson was selected and Lycos an early internet search engine signed up to sponsor the endeavor part of the deal was about five million dollars in Lycos bucks which was basically free banner ads unlike OSes website but how Lycos determined the ad rates was pretty fishy and as it turned out they just weren't displaying those ads they promised at all Tyler Beverly had named his race team Tyler jet Motorsports because he ran a jet sales company was hoping the ads would drive more business his way Tyler eventually sued but before a settlement could be reached he sold off the team to mb2 motorsports who were more interested in racing than selling commercial aircraft and they actually got Johnny Benson his very first career win the Lycos debacle ended up being the very first nail in the coffin for Tyler Beverly as he was brought under investigation for money laundering in 2004 in actuality Tyler had never gotten enough money from Lycos to fund the race team and was actually laundering money from his jet sales company to finance the whole operation he was convicted sent to prison got out and then got popped again in 2017 for tax evasion once a grifter always a grifter I guess alright so shady sponsors are bad for teams no surprise there but what about sponsors that are great for teams but screw over their customers let's talk a minute about AdvoCare AdvoCare is a multi-level marketing company that primarily sold nutritional supplements now multi-level marketing means that somebody at the top sells the products to people down the line then in turn those people sell more stuff to people lower in the line and a portion of all of the money from successive sales is funneled upwards towards the top so people at the top profit more than people down on the lower rungs well that sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme but for legal reasons I can't actually call these companies pyramid schemes however I mean just take a look at their business model what do you call a business model with this shape AdvoCare had sponsored a few race teams NCAA basketball and had even gotten an endorsement from Drew Brees who touted it as a great opportunity for people to earn additional income however the Federal Trade Commission thought that AdvoCare was just a little bit too close to a pyramid scheme for their tastes and they find them for 150 million dollars and told them to completely revamp their business from the ground up the thing that had really gotten them in hot water was when they went around selling their service as being able to generate quote unlimited income considering that the money that currently exists on planet earth right now is finite that's one hell of a thing to say and they paid dearly for it to my knowledge they haven't sponsored anyone in NASCAR since with all of these sketchy sponsors floating around you might be wondering why nobody is around sounding the alarm on these jerks before they actually do the damage but NASCAR NASCAR media core actually have a sort of gentlemen's agreement to keep their hands off of sponsors so as to not scare off any of the good actors to be fair it would only be a matter of time until somebody jumped the gun and said something about a company that just wasn't true which is why everybody was so tight-lipped about the ik9 situation while it was developing so let's talk about the NASCAR media core back in the days when old media was king in the only game in town the media core used to consist of hundreds of beat reporters traveling across the country with NASCAR who worked for a variety of publications ranging from NASCAR seen to the New York Times nowadays though with new media taking the spotlight the core has shrunk to just a few dozen or so and with accurate information at a premium a journalist reputation and Trust is everything if even one reporter goofed than they threatened the legitimacy of all the others so they have a tendency to jettison reporters from their in-group who don't mind their P's and Q's professionalism is everything in these circles but with new media crowding out the old way some new players inevitably come on the scene and threaten the trustworthiness of the whole operation and that gets us to the 2020 Las Vegas media meltdown after the season opener at Daytona had been delayed until Monday night teams and media alike were exhausted when they rolled into Las Vegas on the other side of the country just four days later a new player in the market Motor Racing insider has sent an envoy of theirs to do social media for them on location fellow youtuber Joseph Lombard would signed on with them in late 2019 however when Joseph was just starting to get settled into his new gig on Saturday his phone started blowing up someone had looked into motor-racing Insider and discovered that the articles on their site were plagiarized and I don't just mean one or two of them but all of them and it wasn't like they had just stolen a few paragraphs here and there either they had straight-up copy pasted the entire pickles everything on their site was ripped off from other news sources Joseph was their social media guy not a writer but since he was their only representative at the track he took the heat nonetheless reporters and Twitter users alike hammered him online but after it was a revealed that he himself had done nothing wrong they backed off the head of MRI took to Twitter to calm everybody down saying that they were just an aggregator site not a news site but aggregators post links to articles they don't just copy/paste the whole thing and leave a link down at the bottom and the small print plus there was a parody account going around making things away worse Joseph who was understandably furious tried to contact his boss but found he had changed his name on Facebook and was being very dodgy all around deflecting any blame sent his way MRI went dark shortly thereafter now some people have tried to blame joseph lombard for this saying that he should have looked into his employer more but i disagree it is perfectly reasonable to assume that your employer isn't you know breaking the freaking law it's not your job as an employee to sniff out the inner workings of the business you work for to make sure everything's on the up-and-up i mean nobody's ever taken a job at FedEx and said yeah the job's great but before I sign on the dotted line can I inspect a few of the packages to make sure you guys aren't knowingly transporting illegal drugs oh [ __ ] that would actually happen okay so maybe you should just assume that your employers are all thieving bastards because let's face it they probably are but that's not all from the Las Vegas media meltdown that year during a rain delay on Saturday for the Xfinity race the rumors began circulating among NASCAR media corps members that some other youtuber with media credentials was going around the garage acting very unprofessional well that just won't do with these new media personalities often being the gateway for newer fans entering the sport unprofessionalism affects everyone down the line speculation is that it was Garry and Gilliam aka Black Flag's matter going around the garage trying to get NASCAR drivers to rub a little Buddha statue of his for good luck very unprofessional Darion I don't know that seems pretty innocuous to me then again I've been in this YouTube scene for more than a decade and unless somebody's abusing their kids or faking their own death for views I consider it a pretty slow news day to be honest with you I give Darien a pass on this one but that wasn't the last of the chicane drew from Las Vegas that weekend after the main event in the media center somebody asked a very unprofessional question of the race winner Joey Logano what was this question no one knew at the time all the media core members won't say anything on Twitter everyone's being super professional and tight-lipped about it however Jim utter speculates that it might have been a barstool sports done Jeff Glueck thinks that it might have been a YouTube thing both of them tweet this without any evidence backing this up well that sounds kind of just unprofessional guys when odor is called out on it well he doesn't seem to care an odd thing to say for somebody who says they care about professionalism so much barstool sports is an organization that's pretty new to the whole media core thing and they're in a unique position because they don't have any respect amongst their peers and don't seem to be interested in getting in either they are self-admittedly an outlet ran for and by frat bro types that love college sports David Portnoy the president of barstool sports has a penchant for calling people out on their B s leading harassment campaigns and in general just being kind of a dick so Portnoy was quick to have a few of his guys remind the Twitterverse about how unprofessional Jim utter has and as it turns out he had a habit of towing any car that parked in his designated parking spot one time he even had NASCAR driver Michael McDowell towed why did the other media members not call utter out on this well it was to maintain appearances but barstool just doesn't give a [ __ ] and they outed him David Portnoy as he so often does let a harassment campaign against him utter and honestly they took it too far I mean it was kind of funny of them as it turned out this whole fiasco wasn't a youtube or barstool stunt a guy by the name of Mark Anthony de bello had somehow finagled media credentials despite the fact that on his application papers he stated that he wrote for his own media company and only has 129 subs on YouTube and no real social media presence whatsoever so what was this horrifically unprofessional question he asked long-term question there's talk out there about a ten year plan NASCAR of NASCAR November Charlotte for the Hall of Fame here because it's obviously the gambling capital and congratulations you were five to one to win this race and the final race a week Championship Series in Daytona with the cool part being that the championship the Cup winner gets to be the pole sitter for the race in February Daytona 500 your thoughts about that in the long term that's it that's the whole question geez guys I wasn't so bad now was it I don't understand why this was such a big deal anyway or why the esteemed media core freaked out about it and wondered who it was I mean he had done the same thing last year to the same driver at the same race did nobody catch that that's all news to me only that time back in 2019 he asked would NASCAR move to a four stage format instead of the current three stages which as it turned out that was an idea they had been floating around amongst themselves the man's a prophet is all I'm saying don't be too surprised of what he says actually comes to pass the lesson here folks check your sources stay humble and don't Park in gym mutters a parking spot I mean it's not like I have to worry about that last one I mean I live all the way out in South Carolina there's no way he could possibly wait what's that noise oh [ __ ] damn how did Jim Motor find out where I lived and my license plate number you know what it must have been that time I hooked up to the free Wi-Fi at Daytona International Speedway earlier this year Jim must have used that to track me down if only there was some sort of virtual private network I could have used to protect myself well luckily thanks to our newest supporter Nord VPN you can do just that with the lockdown still ongoing and people spending more time on their phones and computers than ever it's important to keep yourself protected from various narrative Wells roaming the internet and luckily Nord VPN is here to help if you use the affiliate link down below or use coupon code slap shoes spelled straight up with no numbers all lowercase you can get 70% off Nord VPN only 349 a month plus you get an additional month free so don't gamble like I did and go ahead and get yourself some protection out there in these wild and crazy times also impound fees are really expensive yeah Nord VPN is just wait cheap or go with that [Music] so that wraps up the 2020 Las Vegas media meltdown but what about that Twitter parody account that fanned the flames of the MRI situation well right now it's pretty inactive but still up so let's talk about some of these NASCAR parody accounts most are harmless fun but some do too good of a job portraying their real-life counterparts Adam Stern is a highly respected NASCAR journalist and when he says something you can usually take it to the bank but when Adams learn gives you news that's just too good to be true it's time to double check for that blue checkmark and yes even you boys been slurring before I'll admit it these nascar parody accounts can trace their origins to the Twitter account drunken Brian France now this guy wasn't the first to do this but he was the most prolific in this genre real Brian France was the president and CEO of NASCAR from 2003 until 2018 the reason why his tenure ended then is because he got bought for driving under the influence in August of 2018 right after the sport's most popular driver won his very first race yikes now drunken Brian France had made his account back in 2016 and at the time rumors about real Brian Frances substance abuse issues were running rampant so when those rumors turned out to be undoubtedly true drunken Brian Franz had a field day but in the wee hours of early March 2020 and Brian France posted a frightening message real Brian friends had initiated a lawsuit citing damages for mental distress caused by the parody account in the lawsuit drunken Brian France was doxxed as the public lawsuit has his home state and his real legal name sided and DBF was now in some serious legal trouble ok so you might be thinking isn't drunken Brian France protected under US law why yes he is under two major pieces of legal precedents one it's not slander or damaging if it's true that one's been on the books in American law since before the u.s. even declared independence and to parody of a public figure is perfectly okay and hustler vs. Falwell in 1987 televangelist Jerry Falwell sued hustler magazine yes that hustler magazine for publishing a fake interview and which Falwell allegedly talked about his favorite liquors and his first sexual experience with his mom it was obviously satire but Falwell didn't see it that way and in a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court SCOTUS ruled in a rare unanimous that hustler was protected under the First Amendment and it has remained the benchmark for law regarding parody ever since as is typical in the midst of a lawsuit a gag order was handed down and the information was scarce going forward about DBF but about a month later the two had come to a settlement now the agreements of the settlement aren't known as that's a private matter but one thing was made immediately clear part of the settlement was that DBF would issue a public apology and deactivate his account now real Brian France had no intention of ever winning the lawsuit right from the get-go his plan was just to drag it out for so long that DBF would come to the negotiating table begging for forgiveness legal fees are expensive and you can only keep that up for so long real Brian France is still a millionaire and he can spend as much money as he damn well pleases this is what's called a slap suit and no I don't have anything to do with it slap stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation and they're pretty common among people of high standing that don't like regular folks like you and me speaking ill about them and one famous recent example John Oliver of the political comedy show last week tonight got sued by Bob Murray after they were in a segment on Bob showcasing all of his misdeeds then after the lawsuit was dropped John Oliver ran a follow-up show about slap suits and humiliated Bob again showing the slap suits only served to protect the powerful and harm the weak and that's exactly what happened with DBF and real Brian France hey I guess that's just another reason to use nord VPN it'd be really hard for Brian France to track you down now it would be a real shame if say someone with a significant following and a loyal fan base told all of their viewers to start up a bunch of fake Brian France parody accounts and flood the Twitterverse with all sorts of crazy antics I mean I'm not saying anything I'm just saying there's nothing I could do to stop you if you were so inclined legally speaking of course so that about wraps up this edition of the worst liars thieves and lawyers to ever pop up in the NASCAR ecosystem so long as this much money is on the line in these kinds of egos are at stake we'll keep talking about these debacles for years to come until next time I'm slap shoes and I'm sorry you had to watch this y'all take it easy [Music]

Channel: S1apSh0es

Views: 539,268

Rating: 4.8689504 out of 5

Keywords: NASCAR, Bad sponsors, bad sponsorships, Darrell Waltrip, Advocare, Speedblock, iK9, Jeffery Earnhardt, Drunken Brian France, Brian France, free speech, JD Stacy, Mark Martin, DC Solar, pyramid scheme, slapshoes, S1apSh0es, s1ap, slap shoes, motorsports, worst nascar sponsors, Charlotte highlights, Darlington highlights, Barstool Sports, David Portnoy, Jim Utter, nascar media center, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Drew Brees

Id: Lkf2hNmFb_o

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

J. D. Stacy. That's a blast from the past. His whole business model made zero sense at all. Screwed over a lot of good people too. Him and L. W. Wright would've been unstoppable.

[u/BobcatBob26]

Kevin Conway and Extenze come to mind

[u/Harry_Hoover]

Does anyone have anymore info about the incident with Jeffery? Tottaly dick move. But it seems strange as this would only hurt his career badly. And I would asume a driver like Jeffefry would drive any race he could even if it did not lead directly to a full time ride. He allso seemed to have a good relationship with the people at iK9.

[u/slowbaja]

Brian France really is something else. I don't want use the specific word so I won't get sued.

[u/Ryan_Holman]

H2 Motorsports, the team that briefly fielded Shane Lee in the Xfinity Series last year, would be an interesting topic for one of these types of videos.

I have been considering to make a video about them.

[u/hahapphaha]

Slap is my favorite Youtuber right now

[u/LarryLobster666]

Those lycos cars looked great though.

[u/Suzy-Supergal]

Why is Cole Trickle's dad not mentioned??

[u/lindseynelsonsjacket]

I wish he would have gone into more about JD Stacy, especially how stiffed Neil Bonnett and Harry Hyde.

And how DBF started up the crap about Kyle Busch cheating on his wife which doesn't make him the true "folk hero" that he is and should serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when these parody accounts let their newfound fame go to their heads.