Wednesday (June 25) was a sad day for many in the Southern Virginia racing season and beyond, as longtime NASCAR fixture and three-time Daytona 500 champion car owner, Larry McClure, died at the age of 81.
McClure was the co-owner of longtime NASCAR Cup Series team Morgan-McClure Motorsports, which became known as a dominant force on superspeedways in the early 1990s and had a number of great drivers take the wheel.
Considering the long tenure of Morgan-McClure at NASCAR’s highest levels, it was more than worth examining all that the team accomplished upon McClure’s passing. And in some way, it was fairly easy to: After all, the team to this day has an unmistakable identity that in some ways perfectly represents what gave NASCAR its mass appeal.
No one can think of Morgan-McClure Motorsports without thinking of its longtime sponsor: Midway through the 1986 season, Morgan-McClure picked up sponsorship from the Eastman Kodak Company, bringing one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in photography to NASCAR at a time where the sport was still finding its way from regional to national appeal. From that point onwards, the Kodak car – with its red No. 4 easily distinguishable from the company’s shade of yellow – became easy for everyone from the layman to the heartiest of race fan to pick out of the pack.
Kodak was just one of the many consumer brands that redefined NASCAR sponsorship, and it certainly helped that their car ran up front and was a contender to win any given week, especially when it came to the sport’s biggest and fastest tracks. From 1991 to 1996, few cars were faster on superspeedways than the Morgan-McClure No. 4.
With nine wins between Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway during this time period — including three Daytona 500s in five years — you could be assured that the Morgan-McClure car would be up at the front on the sport’s biggest stages and that its driver would be among the contenders.
Even as Morgan-McClure lost its advantage on superspeedways and gradually tailed off in overall performance, their car still had a sort of constant quality to it: The No. 4 Kodak Chevrolet had a look all its own, a reputation of performance and a history of winning drivers behind the wheel. It remained that way until the end of the 2003 season, when Kodak left the team after 17 years in favor of a third car at Team Penske.
When viewed through a certain lens, the Morgan-McClure Kodak car actually represents quite a bit of how much NASCAR sponsorship has changed and some of what was lost along the way. The changing business of NASCAR and its necessities, combined with outside economic factors, have created an environment where full season sponsors and full season paint schemes are few and in-between.
Most teams now employ a platoon of sponsors, with some multi-car teams now rotating their sponsors across each of their different cars. And while there remain some constants — Kyle Larson‘s HendrickCars No. 5 and Joey Logano‘s Shell/Pennzoil No. 22 come to mind — it’s become increasingly rare for a car to not only keep the same sponsor, but retain the same look from year to year.
Along those same lines, consumer brands aren’t the same seemingly bottomless well of sponsorship opportunities they once were, and that vacuum has been filled by business-to-business partnerships encompassing manufacturing, technology, and other parts of how race teams make themselves viable businesses.
While those sorts of sponsors are more than welcome, as they keep cars on the track and lights on at the shop, it isn’t a stretch to say that the average race fan doesn’t quite connect to them the same way they do with a consumer brand. As was the case with Kodak, whose cameras they could go out and buy and make a part of their lives if they weren’t already.
This isn’t to lament the current state of NASCAR sponsorship, the dizzying pace that cars change paint schemes and sponsors or to make some type of argument about its effect on stock car racing’s identity: It’s simply the way things are, and the way the sport has had to adapt in the face of a world and an economy that has changed immensely since the 1990s.
Still, it’s easy enough to miss those simpler times, and to appreciate the contributions that the Morgan-McClure Kodak car made in helping NASCAR affirm and market its identity as the top form of auto racing in the U.S. And surely, that’s just one more thing to remember and admire about what Larry McClure brought the sport in his lifetime.
