Robby Gordon says he needs more sponsorship to run full 2010 Cup season
AVONDALE, Ariz. – Team owner/driver Robby Gordon said he will run the first eight races of next year and hope that he can find sponsorship for the rest of the season or he will have to sit some races out.
Gordon is losing primary sponsor Jim Beam after this year and he said he had 11 races this season that he didn’t have a sponsor even if logos were on the car.
“I’ve got a good marketing staff,” Gordon said Friday at Phoenix International Raceway. “We’ve got a good team put in place. We’ve got the cars. We’ve got the equipment. We’re set through March. … We’re working hard. We just found out about Beam not too long ago and are trying to recover from that.
“If we have any luck, we will.”
Gordon has driven for himself the last five years in the Cup series. He is 34th in the driver standings this year, where he has had nine races where he hasn’t finished this year and his team has struggled in the pits.
“Our results are not the best,” Gordon said. “It’s easy to go out there and blame the economy for everything, but if we ran better – you see teams get sponsorship that win races. What we’ve got to do is figure out how to win races. What comes first? Do you have enough money to win the races or do you have the team to win races?
“I think it takes both. Right now, I know where our weaknesses are. It’s just purely a dollars and cents issue, an operational budget issue.”
Gordon said while he was not interested in a merger – “I’d rather just shut the lights off,’ he said – he was open to putting another driver in the car for select races if the driver was capable and had sponsorship.
“It has to be somebody capable,” Gordon said. “Hypothetically, I joked around with David Gilliland, and said, ‘If you have a couple of deals and I have a couple of deals, why don’t we just mix them together and run one car all the time?’ Obviously, both of us hope that we don’t get into that situation and both of us have deals to run the season.”
Gordon said he would have to lay people off if his organization doesn’t get sponsorship soon. The 11 races he didn’t sell this year were the races at Dover, Pocono, Richmond, Martinsville, California, and one Michigan this year.
“We’ve got a lot of mouths to feed,” Gordon said. “We’ve got a lot of people who dedicated a lot of time into our program. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that them and their families are secure. Unfortunately, it’s just a fact of dollars and cents.
“Everybody has to get paid for the job they do and you’ve got to be able to stay in business.”
