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NASCAR a crucial part of Chevrolet’s marketing arm

INDIANAPOLIS — Chevrolet had fun last week at the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, hosting its annual golf outing at Brickyard Crossing.

As you might have heard, it hasn’t been all fun and games lately in the car and truck business, and some have speculated that one or more of the major manufacturers involved in NASCAR racing might get out of the sport in the face of mounting losses, sagging sales and the economic drain that the current fuel crisis has placed on their business.

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Terry Dolan, head of Chevy Racing, addressed that point-blank just before teeing off in the annual best-ball tournament on the championship golf course that surrounds Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“I don’t anticipate that GM would completely leave racing,” Dolan said, standing next to one of the new-generation Chevrolet vehicles, the Chevy Traverse, that will be in showrooms this fall. “You have to look at what we do: We manufacture cars and trucks.

“Consumers who are automotive enthusiasts are also race fans, and they enjoy seeing cars and trucks do exceptional, high-speed, dynamic things on the track. It’s a great portfolio for us. If you look at Chevy and all the racing that we are involved in, we sell a lot of cars and trucks to race fans, and we plan to continue to do that.”

As for NASCAR, Dolan said that program is annually put through the same test that all the other series that Chevrolet supports are.

“We look at all our racing platforms on three key elements,” he said. “No. 1, can we race to win? If we’re there, can we be up front and leading the pack? No. 2, is the audience relevant to our brand? Does it consist of the people that buy our cars and trucks? No. 3, do we get a quality return on investment for the money that we put into the sport?

“It takes two investments. It takes a technology investment, to get cars prepared to compete, and it takes a go-to-market investment to literally take the on-track message and convert it into something that’s meaningful to a consumer to drive their behavior to want to purchase a vehicle.

“We’re constantly evaluating all the series we participate in. We put them through that three-step evaluation and we determine whether or not it makes sense for us to continue. We’ve been in business for 100 years. We’re looking forward to the next 100 years in our chapter in history. I would guess that, whether we’re racing gasoline-powered cars or perhaps battery-powered vehicles or even hydrogen-powered vehicles, there will be General Motors vehicles racing somewhere across the globe.”

When you think about racing without Chevrolet, it’s a pretty bleak landscape. As folks from the brand are fond of saying, “racing is in their DNA.” Chevrolet’s founder, Louis Chevrolet, believed wholeheartedly in the power of motorsports to sell cars, and that hasn’t changed much.

However, Dolan did say that the primary focus of the brand is to sell cars and trucks, and that’s been a big challenge lately.

“As you look at the marketplace, we’re faced with an unprecedented rapid shift in consumer demand,” Dolan said. “They still want utility, they still want versatility, but they want to see a more efficient use of the fuel they put in the tank.”

 One such effort to give the consumer a fighting chance at all the things they want is the Traverse.

“Today, we brought one of our new vehicles out, a Chevy Traverse, which provides a family hauler in a crossover-style sport utility, so it drives and rides like a car, but it looks and feels like a sport utility vehicle,” Dolan said. “You can take a family of eight, load ‘em up into one of these, get 24 mpg on the highway and very comfortably transport your family and the things you need to have to go on a trip without having to pull a trailer behind or put things up on the roof. It’s an outstanding vehicle.

“Along with that, there are other things like our hybrid Tahoe, which takes technology being used by other manufacturers in smaller cars and allows you to again get the versatility and utility factors in a larger compartment. So consumers who have the need to haul people or to haul items or to tow something that is part of their lifestyle — a boat, a jet ski, a motorcycle or a camper — it enables them to do that. Right around the corner is a full-size Silverado in a hybrid format, so that the man who is a contractor, a plumber or carpenter or some other form of trade can still utilize his Silverado and get good utility and outstanding fuel efficiency.”

Chevrolet, within the framework of the massive General Motors family, has to make its own business make sense to remain viable and to succeed in an arena that is every bit as tough as Indy or Pocono or Michigan — the marketplace.

“We have a technical group of experts, the engineers of GM Racing, and literally they are direct liaisons with us on the marketing side,” Dolan said. “As we develop our go-to-market strategy, we literally look at the series we’re involved in and how that makes sense for us to drive the business, and we have to find that connectivity. We’re in this as a business, we have to be able to sell cars and trucks, and we have to show that we’re doing that through the work we’re doing on-track, at-track or through the variety of marketing tools we have, whether that’s print, TV, radio or the magnificent power of the Internet to get that job done.”

That’s why, as Dolan says, that there will likely be a Chevrolet or GM vehicle racing in the 2050 Allstate 400 at the Brickyard: It’s in their DNA.