What does NASCAR purchase mean for Grand-Am?

What does the acquisition mean for Grand-Am?
Roger Edmondson: I believe it is going to be very beneficial to our teams in terms of sponsor search. I believe it is going to be very beneficial to Grand-Am in terms of the press paying more attention to our stories and our great racing that they have heretofore been ignoring, and I also think the NASCAR brand obviously is synonymous with great racing, whether you like road racing or oval racing. Some of the folks who have not paid attention to Grand-Am in the past will now have reason, out of curiosity, to see what's going on over here. My experience has been that once people see our racing, they like it. Quite clearly, if we can make inroads into that 75 million person fan base that NASCAR has, it's going to really mean a lot to Grand-Am and sports car racing in general.

Will we see any changes to the competition?
No. Grand-Am is going to continue to be Grand-Am. When people think of NASCAR, they don't think of us. Their image of NASCAR is a different type of racing – as different a sport as softball is from baseball. But it's a related sport. The best part that comes to us from NASCAR is going to be the marketing and communications expertise that NASCAR has developed over these years of their great success. Our sport – and the way we operate our sport – will remain unchanged.

How is Grand-Am going to fit in to the NASCAR hierarchy?
One of the things that I've said for many years is that you're known by the company you keep. In Grand-Am, we've been proud to be keeping company with Rolex. In the car brands, Lexus and Porsche, well-respected upscale brands. In GM, they've put Pontiac instead of Chevrolet. Cask No. 16 from Crown Royal. There is a clear path of our choosing the upscale partners. So I think it's natural to understand that Grand-Am will be the premier product of NASCAR. NASCAR has its own niche, its own audience, and its own set of sponsors. Grand-Am will continue to do the same, except that ours will be a little more upscale in the mix.

Hasn't Grand-Am enjoyed a close working relationship with NASCAR since the sanctioning body was announced in 1999?
Grand-Am has always had NASCAR genes. Quite clearly, the France family and myself were the major partners and stockholders in the company. Of the 25 investors, almost all of them came from this campus, whether they worked for NASCAR or the International Speedway Corporation. So while we've told people from the beginning that we were not owned by NASCAR and were not a NASCAR product, there's no question that the NASCAR ethics of close competition, parts availability to all participants and all of those fundamental fairness things that NASCAR has as part of its story, have been part of our makeup, too. I think now that only thing that really changes from our corporate standpoint is instead of 25 owners, we have one. But that one owner has the resources to really make the difference to where we can take this thing.

As the first employee of Grand-Am, and President since its inception, what does the acquisition mean for Roger Edmondson?
I see it as a graduation day. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished with a relatively small amount of resources that we brought to bear when we started Grand-Am. Now, we're going to have the chance to move it to the next level. So, I'm very excited about all this. I'm going to continue on as president as long as Jim France and the family believe I'm doing the job, and I hope that our teams and fans believe that I'm doing the job and we can move forward together.