Video: Robin Miller with Verizon CEO Dan Mead

Robin Miller interviews Dan Mead, CEO of Verizon, about the wireless company's plan behind its title sponsorship of the IndyCar Series.

MARK MILES: “We love the fact that Verizon has been involved in INDYCAR racing with the Penske team and as the official wireless partner of INDYCAR for four years. These are folks that understand us deeply and have thought carefully about the possibilities of this relationship. That gives us great confidence as we go forward in years ahead. From our perspective, we have the exact same targets in terms of the people we’re trying to reach and attract and we have the same agenda. We think Verizon is the perfect partner. I’ll say thank you to Dan and thank you to Verizon for how fast they quickly has rallied. They have teams of people here."

DAN MEAD: “This is really important to us. We have a lot of opportunities to sponsor all kinds of sports and music events, and we decided we needed to focus on just a couple of big areas. One of the primary areas of interest for us was our brand the quality of our brand and the quality of the partnership that we have. What we do is try to match brands up. What we’ve done is match up the NFL and Verizon and the second move was to match up INDYCAR and Verizon. We like the quality of the entertainment for our customers and we’ve been bringing customers to events for years. We like competition. We’re in a extremely competitive industry and we thrive on the competitive environment and we think it’s a great match with INDYCAR. We like the activity. We like the competition and we like how close things are. We also think we can help with the devices and technology that we offer. With LTE and all the smartphones and tablets, we can make the racing experience more personal for everyone around the track.

“This is an important race because it’s the first race of the season, but it’s also important because it’s our first race as the title sponsor. It’s important to all of our fans. We see a lot of people using our App – INDYCAR 14. People have told us how exciting it is to have us, I’ll make a commitment to you. It’s our job to help make it more exciting. It’s our job to our very best and we’ll work hard to do better at the next race moving forward."