More than a few people sat up and took notice of a Smooth sponsored rally car that got good coverage on last week’s ESPN X-Games. Keenly aware of Smooth’s multi-national corporate growth plans that we are, it was still surprising to see the company logo smother all over a rally car on TV. We chased down Smooth president & CEO (and former MXA editor) Mike “Kogie” Koger to get the inside skinny.

“I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from Rally America asking if I would be interested in sponsoring one of the drivers as their main sponsor pulled out of X Games at the last minute and they were at X Games with a plain black car. They were hoping I could sponsor part of the car (hood, side, roof, trunk, etc) for a different price depending on what part of the car. They asked if I knew of anyone else who might want to sponsor as well and after making a few phone calls to various companies inside the motorcycle industry, I realized that everyone would have the same response; it is way too late (as there were only five days until the actual race).

“So I got back to Rally America and said that I would work on a design and let them know how much I could afford to spend. Obviously at this late in the game I knew the chances of another sponsor signing up were slim to none so I decided to have my designer do a mock up of the car with the whole car wrapped in SMOOTH graphics (instead of only the hood, roof or sides featuring our logo). I knew we could come up with a really cool design and to me that was one of the most important things for this car was to not have it shown on ABC as a solid black car.
“I was excited to hear back from Rally America and Pat Moro (the driver and owner of the Rally Car) that they really liked the design and agreed to what I could afford to sponsor the entire car for X Games weekend. So we went to work and here is how the schedule went:

Tuesday afternoon: We agreed on the deal to sponsor the entire car

Tuesday midnight: My designer finished the graphics for the car and I e-mailed comp to Pat for approval (we had no template or anything to go off so my designer had to draw the car and come up with graphics in about 6 hours time)

Wednesday noon: We had final approval on graphics and I called a company who has done some jobs in the motocross industry (recently had done some last minute updates to the Warthog Racing semi for us) and asked them if they could print the graphics by Thursday. Thankfully they said they could but they didn’t have any type of template either so I had to get in touch with the mechanics and get them to measure the entire car (each area separately) so that I could let the print house know the sizes of each part of the car.

Wednesday evening: We had uploaded the graphics to the print house’s FTP site so they could print graphics on Thursday. I also asked my designer to bust out a design for Pit Shirts. Once the shirt design was completed I forwarded to Paul and Justin at Gear Racewear and asked them if there was anyway possible to print and sew the crew shirts by end of day Thursday and overnight for Friday delivery. They were actually already working on some crew shirts we were doing for Kenny Bartram’s team and amazingly they said they thought they could have ALL of our shirts (both designs) finished in time.

Thursday morning: I called an installer that we’ve used before (for the Warthog Racing semi) and confirmed that he was available on Friday to wrap the car. Luckily he was.

Thursday afternoon: They finished printing the wrap for Pat’s car in the late afternoon. I also wanted to surprise Pat with autograph posters since they had autograph signings at X Games and I wanted to make sure he had something to sign. The problem was, we didn’t have any photos of his car with our graphics. So, I asked Ananda from Rally America if they could get me a photo of Pat from practice today and e-mail to me. He said he would and I received the photo about 7 or 8 that night. Keep in mind when we got the photo of the car, it was plain black (as it wasn’t getting wrapped until Friday).
Thursday midnight: My designer brilliantly photo shopped the graphics he designed onto the photo of the plain black car and finished up the whole design for the poster. Honestly unless you really stare at the poster closely, you could not tell that the car did not have the Smooth graphics in the photograph.
Friday morning: I called the print house to confirm everything was good-to-go with the graphics. They said it went great and the graphics were already being delivered to the Home Depot Center (they arrived by 9am). I called the installer to confirm he was on his way and he arrived by 11am to get started. Next I called a print shop across the street from us to see if somehow they could print 1,000 autograph posters by the end of the day. They thought they could and I left it in their hands.

By 10:30 am I received two UPS boxes with the crew shirts for both Bartram’s team and Pat Moro/Smooth Team. They looked great, especially since they started them on Wednesday and finished on Thursday.
Friday late evening: Our installer finished the wrap, I picked up the autograph posters and I had the Crew Shirts.

I still can’t believe we were able to pull all of this off in virtually 3 days (since it was all finished by Friday). I could not have done it without the extraordinary help from my designer, the print house who printed the graphics, the installer, the guys at Gear Racewear, Ananda at Rally America for getting me the photo for the autograph poster and the print company who made the posters.

Unfortunately Pat, who is only about 5 points away from clinching the 2008 Production GT class in the Rally America series…with 3 races still left in the season (one class down from the class the Travis Pastrana, Ken Block and Kenny Bartram race (they race open and Pat races production), lost his elimination race by less than 2 seconds and did not move into the semi finals or finals but we got a lot of exposure and more importantly we were able to help out a great guy and team.” For more info, Click Here.