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A little while ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece on the oversaturation of sponsorship in sports and how it had taken over the game. Well, I did not even begin to talk about the fastest growing sport in the country -- yes the one that has sponsors pasted all over the screen, athletes, and equipment. The one and only: NASCAR.

Not many know this, but NASCAR stands for National Association of Stock Car Racing. Funny, becaues although it's roots come from people taking "stock" or cars that are built and available to the public, and racing them, today's cars are designed to be engineering test mules for the companies that compete. Of course, this costs millions of dollars, and car, tire, and parts supplier companies do not want to foot the entire bill of their research and development budgets on a bunch of beer-swilling kids, so they require team owners to secure sponsors for the team. Each team owns a car, and each car has major sponsors and minor sponsors. Usually, a team will have 2-3 primary sponsors who get to be placed prominenly on the hood (one primary per race). When a driver wins a race, he has his picture taken with the race trophy while wearing the cap of each sponsor. A typical driver in NASCAR takes between 30-40 of these pictures, and each sponsor gets to use the shot of driver in their cap in an ad.

Well, I knew that the business side of NASCAR had gone too far when we had this exchange at a family dinner table:

Wife/mother brings a small medicine cup to the table. 8 year old son asks what it is. Husband/father says it is "Wallrussin" (which happens to be Walgreen's brand version of Robitussin). Son asks, "who sponsors him?"