AMERICAN FLAT TRACK CEO MICHAEL LOCK: PART 2
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Interview
and safer racing environment.
Now all this costs money, so
do you have a series sponsor
on the horizon yet for 2020?
What we're doing is looking
at the model a lot of sports are
going into now, including for
example NASCAR, where they're
moving away from category and
title sponsors, and much more
towards a model of tiered spon-
sorship. So, if you come in at the
top tier as a sponsor, you get a
lot of assets, and you get a lot
of visibility and communications
and support and positioning. And
there could be three, four, five of
those tiered, top-tiered spon-
sors, and then there'll be middle
tier and lower tier. We're not at
the cutting edge of that, I'm just
a student of what some bigger
sports are doing. But what it
means is, that we should have a
much more flexible model, which
hopefully means that we have a
bigger bucket of revenue to be
able to use to improve the sport.
Will increasing the revenue
mean increasing the prize
money?
The purses in American Flat
Track have risen pretty mod-
estly in the last couple of years,
because we've not had sponsors
coming in specifically supporting
them, other than a fine company
named Roof Systems which is a
commercial roof builder based
in Dallas, Texas, headed up by
Jerry Stinchfield. Jeffrey Carver
is one of his riders, so is Jesse
Janisch and, in fact, Shayna
Texter was supported by him,
too. Roof Systems were the title
sponsor for the AFT Singles in
2019, and as part of their spon-
sorship package, they contrib-
uted towards the purse. They'll
be involved again next year in
AFT. We need more sponsors
Lock sees rider safety as a priority in 2020.
