FINDING MONEY FOR MOTORSPORT


By Christopher Larmour
Published by Sportsworks Publishing

There's an urban myth – which may or may not have its foundations in a true story – that refers to an ad in the classifieds section of a newspaper. The ad reads something to the effect of 'Make $10,000 in a week without leaving your house! Send $100 to find out how!'. So a person sends their cheque off. A couple of weeks later, they receive their 'information package' in the mail. It's a letter, which reads, 'Place an ad in your local paper saying "Make $10,000 in a week…'. After reading the book 'Finding Money for Motorsport', I'm wondering whether I have stumbled across a motorsport equivalent. How do you find money to go motor racing? Publish a book titled 'Finding money for motorsport'. Perhaps I'll write my own book about obtaining sponsorship and see how it goes. If you suddenly see my name on an F3000 entry list, you'll know it works.

The thing, of course, is that if you discount the zillionaire drivers at the top of the tree, then the racer who doesn't need money – usually lots of it, and almost always fairly urgently - is a very rare and fortunate breed. So the potential market for a book like this is virtually as big as the worldwide racing fraternity.

There's a fair chance that a book like this will sell reasonably well, irrespective of how useful it is. Which is probably a good thing for author Christopher Larmour, because this book doesn't seem to be particularly brilliant. Before I start sledging the thing left, right and centre, I should acknowledge that the proof, ultimately, is in the pudding. I didn't actually try to use this book to raise money for motor racing (given that I neither race seriously myself, or manage any young hopefuls, there wasn't much opportunity to try... besides which I have only had the book for a week), and without having done so, I guess I haven't given it a complete road test. But having read it a couple of times, I can't say that it made much of an impression.

If this book is to be believed, then the guidelines to hunting sponsorship are basically the same as those recommended for job seekers. Target the right person, keep your letters honest and to the point, and present yourself in the best possible light without going completely over the top.

One problem with 'Finding Money for Motorsport' is that it takes an awfully long time for Lamour to get around to actually telling you anything. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact the book contains a grand total of thirty pages of text. And that is well-spaced text, further broken up by some fairly inane cartoons that look like they come from one of those Year 8 textbooks that attempt to make something like math look funky.

And of those thirty pages, the first ten are devoted to telling you why you have done the right thing by buying this book instead of all the other sponsorship books on the market. This becomes something of a recurring theme – a particular style of approaching sponsors (e.g. flyers) is mentioned and shot down in one paragraph before moving along to the next method that the author deems ineffective.

It did not take long before I began to wonder when Larmour was going to tell me about the useless methods that his book was not going to address, and actually get down to the business of teaching me how to raise enough money to become the next big thing in Formula Renault (or whatever).

When you boil it all down, though, Larmour's 'specially developed method' for finding sponsorship seems to consist wholly and entirely of doing well-planned, appropriately targeted, direct mailouts. With a minimal amount of embellishment, that seems to be the grand total of how to go about getting sponsorship, Larmour-style. No doubt it has its merits, and it seems to have worked well for him, but two or three useful paragraphs do not constitute a book. Especially one carrying a price tag around 14 UK pounds.

Unbelievably, though, Larmour has actually written a sequel, which, according to the ad on the back cover, 'goes beyond the basics'. Considering that this book is really little more than a heavily-padded pamphlet, the notion of expecting people to shell out again for what could prove to be more of the same seems a little outlandish.

Given that 'Finding Money for Motorsport' doesn't come close to approaching what could be called, in any seriousness, a 'book', why not combine the two into a single volume?

My overwhelming impressions of this book were that it seemed overpriced, and critically insubstantial. Of course, the cover price is peanuts compared to the possible benefits should you happen to land a sponsorship deal if you follow Larmour's approach, so the possible benefits should be taken into account, but at the end of the day I find it difficult to imagine that this book will make much of a difference in helping young racers further their career.