PNC moves to primary sponsor at Ganassi

Scott Dixon’s No. 9 Honda will sport a PNC Bank paint scheme for the full 2018 Verizon IndyCar Series season. Photo: Getty Images Scott Dixon’s No. 9 Honda will sport a PNC Bank paint scheme for the full 2018 Verizon IndyCar Series season. Photo: Getty Images Scott Dixon’s No. 9 Honda will sport a PNC Bank paint scheme for the full 2018 Verizon IndyCar Series season. Photo: Getty Images

It took a tad longer than owner Chip Ganassi expected, but his IndyCar team has found a replacement for Target.

Chip Ganassi Racing this week will announce that Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank will become the full-season primary sponsor of Scott Dixon’s No. 9 Honda for the 2018 Verizon IndyCar Series campaign. Financial and length terms were not disclosed, but a full-season IndyCar deal for a top team like Chip Ganassi Racing typically costs around $10 million annually.

PNC has an existing relationship with the team owner, who is also from Pittsburgh and has been a customer of the bank personally and professionally for decades. The bank has had a smaller deal with the team for several years, but this marks the first time it will become a primary sponsor — and for all 17 races.

Target was a 28-year sponsor with Chip Ganassi Racing overall but exited the IndyCar side after 2016 and then followed by leaving the NASCAR side — and thus motorsports altogether — in 2017. Credit One Bank and DC Solar have since become primary sponsors of Kyle Larson’s No. 42 Chevrolet for most of the NASCAR season, leaving the race team with only about a half-dozen races left to sell.

Bill Demchak, chairman, president and chief executive of PNC Bank, said the company decided to step into the role both because it saw positive results in its prior deal and because he was “stunned” that no other corporation had stepped up to replace Target as of a few months ago.

“We thought and then proved to ourselves, going back to the deal that started in 2014, that we had a set of clients who were race car fanatics and if we activated the sponsorship the right way, it would be great for us, our brand and clients,” said Demchak, who went to high school with Ganassi at Fox Chapel Area High School near Pittsburgh. “This is an evolution of that.”

Photo: Chip Ganassi Racing Photo: Chip Ganassi Racing Photo: Chip Ganassi Racing

Assets of the deal include hospitality and access to appearances with Dixon. PNC plans to promote the deal on its digital and social channels.

Demchak said the company, which is handling the deal in-house, has closely tracked its return on investment from the partnership by keeping tally of how much business it does with clients it entertains at races.

He recalled an example from a few years ago in which PNC took an Indiana-based businessman to Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The businessman had been to the track dozens of times but had never gone onto the starting grid, something PNC arranged for him to do, leading the man to tears.

“We have every bit of that guy’s business unless we screw it up for now till the rest of time,” Demchak said. “Racing is like that — the emotion it has for certain people. Our job is to make sure we match it off against clients who have that interest and we found that there’s a lot of them.”

He said that eight of the race markets for IndyCar events are key markets for PNC, which has a strong footprint of retail banks in the East Coast and Midwest, and also does some work on the West Coast.

Demchak said he’s looking for business-to-business and business-to-consumer results from the deal, adding that IndyCar’s “mass affluent consumer” fan base “is our target audience.”

Ganassi, who just won his 200th race as an owner in motorsports two weeks ago at the IMSA Rolex 24 at Daytona, said that in retrospect, it “was a little tougher than I expected” to replace Target. He added that he’s not looking at the PNC relationship as one that exists simply because the two sides have ties to Pittsburgh.

“It’s the hometown bank but I think more important, I have to look at it from a national perspective,” Ganassi said. “To have someone with the national view and a brand like PNC on the car, it says a lot about our team, Scott Dixon and the sport.”