Nascar’s been building a fan database for years. Will a larger fanbase follow?

Nascar is known for speed on track, but there’s no gas pedal for building a fandom quickly.

About one-third of Americans consider themselves fans of Nascar, and about one-quarter of those fans say they’re “more engaged with Nascar now than they were in previous seasons,” according to a recent report from MRI-Simmons. But Nascar is no NFL, a league so large that about half of Americans consider themselves fans.

Nascar execs, though, have a plan to accelerate passion for their sport—and the engine is its customer data platform, or CDP, that’s designed to provide industry stakeholders, including track owners and race promoters, with a common definition and understanding of a Nascar fan. Internally, Nascar uses the CDP for fan segmentation, a strategy that’s becoming increasingly common across US leagues including MLS and the NFL, as well as international governing bodies like the World Surf League.

At Nascar, the platform has existed in some form for about a decade. But it’s only recently that the league has started to put that data to use to move people through the fan funnel, according to Cara Verwholt, Nascar’s VP of performance marketing. The approach offers a look at what other leagues that have undertaken similar efforts might expect.

“It seems simple in practice, but there’s so many things competing for our attention, for our dollars,” Verwholt, a former NFL marketer, told Marketing Brew. “Our fans are fans of the NFL. They’re fans of other sports. They go to concerts. They spend money on live event experiences. The data can tell you all of that. That’s the opportunity, but that’s also the challenge—share of mind, share of wallet—and we want to continue to break through and build that relationship so that fans think of us first.”

Into the barrier

It’s not just competition from other sports and experiences that Nascar is contending with to earn people’s time and attention. There are other barriers to building fandom, too, like the fact that many people tend to prefer watching sports they’ve played, and it’s more common to grow up kicking a soccer ball or tossing a football than driving a racecar.

Then there’s the fact that there hasn’t always been a connected ecosystem for various Nascar stakeholders to share fan data. If a fan visits a track owned by Speedway Motorsports and not Nascar, for example, that fan might not be automatically funneled into a Nascar-owned data platform.

That’s something Verwholt and other Nascar execs, as well as the organization’s partners at sports and entertainment marketing agency Two Circles, have been trying to address. The effort has included assembling a committee of stakeholders to work together on the CDP and align on fan definitions, like who qualifies as a new fan, or an engaged fan. The plan is to establish those definitions by December, ahead of the 2027 season, according to Brooks Ingram, VP of business development at Two Circles, who works on the CDP.

Verwholt said there are other measurement benefits that can come from the CDP. “That’s what gets me really excited,” she said, “because if we collaborate [on] a campaign, as an example, there’s also now a neutral platform that sits in the middle where we can get insights and intelligence.”

Awareness accelerations

Once data is ingested into the CDP and standardized across stakeholders, Nascar can begin using it to activate and monetize, which is the phase the organization is now arriving at, Ingram told us.

One major focus area for Verwholt and her team, she said, is improving brand interest and perception, a sentiment that Nascar EVP and Chief Brand Officer Tim Clark also emphasized at the Autosport Business Exchange, an industry event held in New York last month.

“Nascar doesn’t have a brand awareness problem,” Clark said on stage. “It may have a branding perception problem. That’s up to us to be better storytellers.”

For Verwholt, driving interest in Nascar through brand storytelling goes hand-in-hand with maximizing opportunities to grow and use the CDP.

“It starts with brand work, which Nascar is investing [in] a lot,” Verwholt said. “We have a concerted effort to grow the brand, to reinvigorate our storytelling. That’s a key first step. It’s having that top-of-funnel activity to drive awareness, to drive intent, to drive interest. That way, you see a Nascar spot, you go to the website, you may opt in to receive emails from us, you become a known fan in the database. But that’s only the very start of that journey.”

From there, her team aims to “deepen that attachment” and educate potential fans about the sport, an effort that she said can benefit from fan segmentation and subsequent content creation with Nascar drivers.

That, of course, may be easier said than done. Jimmie Johnson, a pro driver turned Nascar team owner, said he thinks about storytelling more now than he did when he was solely focused on racing.

“I was worried about the rules” and on-track performance then, Johnson said during the Autosport Business Exchange event. “It’s just a different perspective when you’re in that true competition phase.”