Drag Illustrated Issue 114, October 2016 | Page 77

PHOTO: RICK BELDEN

and here I am.
Like I said, the stuff that I’ve been able to learn
just as far as race car mechanics and computers
from the people here has been one of the best
things I can do for my career.
On the flip side, how does your real-world
experience lend to your credibility as a Racepak representative?
We came up with the “We Are You” tagline
because we sat back and realized how amazed
people would be if they knew how many people in
our office raced something, whether it’s a go-kart,
RC cars, PSCA cars—anything—or they work on
a car, or they’ve worked for John Force Racing
for 20 years.
We have a really cool story. There’s not too
many companies you can call and say, “Hey, can
I talk to one of the Top Fuel drivers there?” We
have multiple people who are licensed to go very,
very fast here. That’s something that we wanted
to show; we’re just like our customers. Yeah, we
happen to come into the office Monday through
Friday and get to talk about race cars, but at the
end of the day we’re in the garage working on
our own stuff. We just took that and ran with it.
It’s been very good for us because it shows the
end user that we’re struggling on the weekend just
like they are. Maybe not with our data loggers, but
we use our data loggers to learn about the other

October 2016

problems in our cars so we know how to help our
customers with their problems when they call us.
As the digital marketing director for Racepak, you introduced
the #TeamRacepak
promotion, a campaign to find brand
representatives who
will promote Racepak on the track and
online. Why did Racepak choose to use
grassroots racers to
represent the brand?
The biggest thing is
trying to build brand
awareness for the company. We opened up the
selection process so that
anyone could apply. The
whole program is based
around social media, so
if you don’t know what
a Facebook page is, it’s
probably not a program for you. We’re looking for more than just
a sticker on the side of a race car; we’re looking
for more brand awareness, and social media is
a big part of that.

At the end of the day, we’re giving out thousands of dollars worth of product for free. The
way marketing works is we should be able to get
double or triple that in
return. With me being
a guy who tries to find
sponsors myself, I’ve
learned what sponsors
are looking for and
I applied that to the
program that we decided to make.
How has your opinion of data acquisition
changed since learning the ins and outs
at Racepak?
When I first started working here I was
pretty green. I knew my
away around a computer, but I was just getting
into Super Comp and I
didn’t really know the
importance of data until
I started working here. I was learning so much
even in the first couple months that I wondered
how I even raced without a data logger before.
I used to think, “Oh, Racepak is the company

“The driver is such an
integral part of racing.
You live and die by your
crew, but you also live
and die by the driver.”

DragIllustrated.com

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