A piece of NASCAR nostalgia will be missing from Pocono Raceway this weekend.
NASCAR and merchandising partner Fanatics, Inc. will debut their mega merchandise tent -- a 60,000-square-foot production that would cover one and a half football fields -- this weekend at Pocono.
The old merchandise haulers where fans congregated for T-shirts and other merchandise specific to a single driver or race team are now gone, with the exception of Penske teams, which have outstanding contracts at select tracks through this season.
But NASCAR and Fanatics are betting that a wider selection of products and a more modern and convenient shopping experience will win over fans who enjoy the haulers as a link to the past. And NASCAR has tried to carry some of the old look and feel of the haulers over into the store by including driver and team section fronts.
"There really are these driver and team-branded concepts and stores [in sections]," NASCAR Vice President of Licensing and Consumer Products Blake Davidson said. "There's going to be a lot of product there.
"I think we will start to ease fans' fears. ... The scale of this is going to blow people away."
Dealing in volume
The new mega tents will have merchandise available for 58 drivers, including areas dedicated to certain drivers. The Dale Earnhardt Jr. section alone will likely be 2,000 square feet . In June at Pocono, there was merchandise available for 33 drivers at 23 haulers.
Wait times at the most popular haulers could run more than 30 minutes, leaving fans feeling rushed. The hope is that under the new system, fans will have a more relaxed, hands-on shopping experience, in which they can choose items personally instead of picking them from a display on a trailer wall.
Sixty checkout stations will be available to handle the pre- and post-race rush. There also will be 12 online purchasing stations where fans can buy items and have them shipped home for free.
"I don't know if it's going to be good or bad," said Kyle Busch, who has a wide range of merchandise with Sprint Cup and with his personal sponsors. "I think we have to let it play its way out.
"I don't see any reason as to why it's not going to be better ... having all the driver's stuff in an area to be able to have fans walk through and check out and be able to grab and hold and touch and stuff like that."
The separate sections for women's merchandise, children's merchandise, die-cast models (1,400 available) and hats (10,000 representing 24 drivers) should give fans more options.
By the end of the year, NASCAR and Fanatics hope to have on-site personal printing options where fans can put their names on their purchases. They're also working on adding the capability to print and sell race-winner merchandise to fans after a race, as is the case at other team sport championship events.
Time for a change
None of that was available (and neither was a climate-controlled environment) under the hauler system. Still, many fans viewed the haulers, lined up in rows at the race track, as a unique part of the NASCAR experience. Fans made friends with the people who drove the haulers. And they felt nostalgia for the experience of shopping at the haulers during their first trip to the track with their parents.
But it didn't make money.
Motorsports Authentics, originally a 50-50 partnership between track operators International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports Inc., had performed so poorly that SMI opted last year to just give ISC its 50 percent share outright.
"It is disappointing also to see the trailers go away, there's a lot of people losing their jobs, some of the drivers and coworkers that work those trailers," Busch said. "That's disappointing, but in this world and day and age, everybody is looking to save some money, and less fuel costs up and down the road and less employees -- that's the easy way to save on that business plan."
Fanatics, which already operated NASCAR's online store and has a 10-year deal to operate the tents, will send tents and display fixtures to tracks ahead of time and move merchandise from one race location to the next week to week.
The company will employ some of the same drivers and sales force that ran the hauler system. And it bought 10 of the haulers to use as secondary locations at bigger tracks.
The new system will allow teams to use more vendors to put materials in the Fanatics tent, and Davidson said more companies are interested in producing NASCAR-related apparel with the new tent format.
Davidson and Fanatics executives are expecting to hear feedback from fans through the end of the 2015 season. They plan to use that input to improve the operation in 2016.
Davidson thinks the mega tent will not only improve pre- and post-race shopping, but also the overall fan experience.
"It is going to get better and better as we go along. I look forward to getting everybody's feedback on it," he said.