Kyle Larson just showed how NASCAR drivers are not marketable enough
NASCAR as a sport has always enjoyed, or has faced, an outlandish image in the sports world,
which Kyle Larson unabashedly proved again. The 30-year-old, at the top of stock car racing, is a driver for Hendrick Motorsports,
a team that races in the NASCAR Cup Series and is a regular on winning championships.
Kyle Larson, who looked like a career-ending blunder by California native Elk Grove in 2020,
has since reinvented himself as a champion and is regularly seen as the beater in terms of raw talent .
His most recent win in the Dixie Vodka 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway solidifies the #5 Chevrolet driver's brilliance.
While Larsson is famous in the game, he suffers from global reach.
SportsPro Media, who is in its 13th year of compiling the world's most marketable athletes from all genres of sport,
has placed Kyle Larson at number 100 on a list that is 100 ranks long in its own right.
On a par with sports like snowboarding, Larson is the only representative of the NASCAR fraternity on the list.
This prompts one to think about how marketable NASCAR drivers are in the global landscape when
compared to mainstream sports such as tennis and basketball, as well as other forms of motorsport.
The Kyle Larson brand managed to match the athletes above his rank in terms of strength.
However, Larsen's reach and audience were less than the bottom 5 on the list, which included 100 athletes from around the world.
This shows how NASCAR as a sport still has a long way to go to be a global phenomenon.
With a list dotted with various F1 drivers, NASCAR could learn a thing or two about how to market
itself better in the future from its open-wheel counterparts from across the ocean.
FOR MORE
WEBSTORIES