I’ve kind of talked movie schemes to death, but one thing I haven’t really touched on are the times movies sponsored NASCAR events without directly correlating to a paint scheme within said race.
There haven’t been a ton, but I appreciate whenever these races really lean into it when movies come on board.
Lowe’s Presents the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie 300 (Charlotte Motor Speedway, 2004)
Many things come and go, but SpongeBob is eternal. There has been some sort of SquarePants sponsorship — scheme, race or otherwise — in each of the three decades this millennium so far, and the first came at Charlotte in 2004 (second tweet down; more on the first set of images in a bit).
Hendrick Motorsports fielded two Busch Series cars for the race: Jimmie Johnson‘s No. 48 with SpongeBob on the hood, and Kyle Busch‘s No. 5 with Patrick Star. Both finished in the top five (Johnson third and Busch fifth), but Mike Bliss ended up coming home with his first ever series win.
All love to Bliss, but the SpongeBob cars running 1-2 would’ve been pretty awesome to see. Love that the mascots got in on the action too.
Bass Pro Shops MBNA 500 (Atlanta Motor Speedway, 2004)
This one isn’t a race sponsorship, per se, but has to do with some on-site advertising.
I came across this post on Instagram a while back, which shows cardboard zebras dotting the hill around Atlanta Motor Speedway for the fall 2004 race. This was for the film Racing Stripes, which came out the following year, but the promotion was originally supposed to be more elaborate.
Jeff Gordon had a whole black-and-white zebra car designed for the movie, but the scheme was nixed after the 2004 HMS plane crash in favor of the “Always In Our Hearts” schemes featuring those lost in the tragedy.
There are also some photos of Gordon with cast member Steve Harvey visiting some Victory Junction kids with the car and, unfortunately, some of the worst firesuits ever sewn:
Batman Begins 400 (Michigan International Speedway, 2005)
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey comes out this week, which I couldn’t be more hyped for, but he’s been cranking out phenomenal movies for more than a quarter of a century.
I argue Batman Begins is my favorite of the Dark Knight trilogy. Even though its successor is more famous and renowned, I love the origin story of Bale’s Batman and will always watch it on TV (from whatever point it’s at) whenever I stumble across it flipping channels. It’s kind of like The Fellowship of the Ring vs. The Return of the King for Lord of the Rings: The latter is more famed, but the first one sets up everything that unfolds after.
Anyway, the first of Nolan’s trilogy sponsored a vehicle in both Cup and Craftsman Truck competition at Michigan in 2005, along with the Cup race itself. Greg Biffle won the race, but Mark Martin had a cool (albeit miscolored) scheme as his teammate. Ricky Craven had a more tonally appropriate truck scheme for the movie.
And Batman himself gave the command for the race.
SpongeBob SquarePants 400 (Kansas Speedway, 2015)
He’s back.
While there was no SpongeBob film in 2015, research tells me Nickelodeon led this effort to have the animated series back a number of cars, and the race itself, at Kansas in the fall.
Ben Kennedy also had a SpongeBob truck ride that weekend, but the main event was the actual show-sponsored race.
David Ragan, Ty Dillon, Michael McDowell, Greg Biffle and Casey Mears all sported rides featuring SpongeBob, Plankton, Mr. Krabs, Patrick and Squidward, respectively.
Ragan wound up the most unfortunate member of the SpongeBob scheme club, spinning off turn 4 and skidding across the SpongeBob SquarePants 400 logo in the infield.
And Jimmie Johnson also got a pretty cool trophy for winning the race, too.
Furious 7 300 (Chicagoland Speedway, 2015)
Shockingly, it took until the seventh Fast & Furious film to back a race. The first and second films had appeared on Dave Blaney and Scott Wimmer‘s cars, respectively, in the spring 2003 Cup and Busch races at Dover Motor Speedway.
In 2015, Furious 7 (for my money the best film in the franchise) backed the then-Xfinity Series’ visit to Chicagoland. More importantly, series star Ludacris was in attendance as the grand marshal and stuck around (!!!) for the end of the race.
Ludacris joined Kyle Busch for the celebration after Busch won the race. The trophy is pretty amazing, too: It replicates the film’s coup de grace action moment, when Dom and Brian drive the red W Motors Lykan HyperSport out of the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi into another skyscraper.
Unhinged 300 (Talladega Superspeedway, 2020)
Finally, the most recent time a film’s promotion served as race sponsor was in 2020, when the then-Xfinity Series’ spring Talladega event became the Unhinged 300.
Obviously an apt name for a superspeedway race, but it was for a relatively-little-seen thriller that came out that year by the same name, starring Russell Crowe. Unhinged is a genuinely fun movie with some great driving action, pretty insane moments and wild car crashes, all based around road rage taken to an extreme degree — with the tagline “He can happen to anyone.” Which is a sick tagline.
The movie’s branding gave us this minimalistic, creative race logo with a pair of hands having a death grip on a steering wheel. Simple, but effective.
Crowe also gave the command via a fun selfie video from his ranch, which you can watch here. Unhinged is part of this new, fun chapter in Crowe’s career over the past decade or so, which also includes things like The Nice Guys, where he teams up with Ryan Gosling as detectives in ’70s Los Angeles; The Pope’s Exorcist, where he plays an eccentric Father set on exorcising demons while zooming around Italy on a Vespa scooter; and as Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Point is, he’s clearly having a blast in all of these movies as he’s in a spot to pick his own projects, and being in Unhinged and giving the command for the race is a pretty solid representation of that.
If I missed any, let me know! I do remember the Roseanne 300 being a thing at Auto Club Speedway, arguably the equivalent of Bobby Labonte’s Passion of the Christ scheme in terms of the most random, out-of-nowhere pairing of entertainment and race headliner, but as far as I know that’s the only TV headlining sponsor to date.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.
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