CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The cliché is an old, and if the truth be known, a not necessarily true one. However, it has been the backbone of motorsports sponsorship for many years now. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” has been engrained into the industry’s psyche ever since most of us remember. Yet, there is one sponsor that seems to ignore the promotion of its successes no matter where or how high up the food chain they occur.
That company is giant Michelin, one of the world’s three leading tire manufacturers. Don’t get me wrong, Michelin does advertise its products, including its high-performance tires. But, unlike Bridgestone and Goodyear, individual racing achievements are seemingly ignored by the Greenville, S.C.-based U.S. branch of Michelin.
Take, for example, Formula One, where last year — its final season (at least for now) in the World Championship arena. Michelin won yet another title against a very determined Bridgestone. Did Michelin choose to tout this to America, a land (like so many others) fascinated with high technology? After all, most manufacturers involved in F-1 look at the sport as a good way to further polish their technological image with their potential customers.
The answer is not really. Indeed, the advertising silence when it came to Michelin’s lengthy record of achievement in the supposedly premier venue of the motorsports universe was nearly complete, if not totally so. And, that’s not the only example. Michelin has owned the front ranks of the sports-car racing world for more than a decade, dominating at such places as Le Mans and Sebring.
Again, has there been direct advertising reference to its dominant position? Not really. So why is that so?
There are many complex reasons, not the least of which is that Michelin’s reputation for quality and performance has put the company in the position of being able to sell virtually every high-performance tire it can make, and then some. Yet, behind the reluctance is another seemingly valid rationale. Put simply, many of Michelin’s U.S. executives, as is the case with others involved in the automotive universe, don’t understand or embrace performance as a marketing tool. In fact, they tend to shy away from it.
The current hike in gasoline prices has brought out a truism, namely that the bulk of the country (even with the ever-increasing popularity of NASCAR)  gives their own automobiles — much less performance-oriented ones — little thought. Smaller, more gas-efficient vehicles are what we want now, and the fact that racing can, has and continues to lead the way in improving that efficiency is lost on the majority of the public and a number of automotive executives, many of whom still harbor the notion that “speed kills.”
The irony is that racing in the past three and a half decades has spent as much, if not more time on safety than it has on going fast. What the sport needs to do is to get the Michelins of this world to enlighten their customers to that fact, and not talk, if they talk at all, to just the relatively few of us who embrace performance and racing.
It is, ultimately, a matter of survival.