by Susan Brown Williams and Amy Mahfouz


With NASCAR now claiming one-third of all American adults as followers—including a growing swarm of blue-state and female fans—corporate America is stumbling all over itself to get in on the action, reports FORTUNE.

In an in-depth cover story, writers Brian O’Keefe and Julie Schlosser look at the fastest-growing, best-run sports business in America. “Once the province of moonshine runners and good ol’ boys, the sport has courted corporate America for decades” report O’Keefe and Schlosser. “But NASCAR’s recent explosion in popularity—and the establishment of its racetracks as big-time commercial venues—is unprecedented.”

The story appears in the September 5 issue and at www.fortune.com.

The second-most-watched sport on television behind pro football, NASCAR has seen its ratings increase by more than 50% since it inked a six-year, $2.4 billion network deal five years ago. The sport is on pace this year for its highest TV viewership ever; the last time a professional sport set a new high was the NFL in 1981.

With NASCAR drivers becoming media-savvy, fan-friendly marketing machines, 106 FORTUNE 500 companies have become involved as sponsors—more than in any other sport. Licensed retail sales of NASCAR-branded products have increased 250% over the past decade, totaling $2.1 billion last year alone (up from $1.3 billion in 2000). Nascar.com is one of the most highly trafficked sports websites. The NASCAR name is so hot that market research firm PSB picked it as the country’s No. 2 brand for 2005, ahead of both Google and iPod (BlackBerry was No. 1).

At the center of it all is a private, family-controlled for-profit company started 57 years ago in Daytona Beach, Florida. “Once focused on simply bringing order to the cheerful, low-down chaos of stock-car racing—where vehicle standards used to shift from track to track—the business today is run like a FORTUNE 500 company, dot-com, and media conglomerate rolled into one,” say O’Keefe and Schlosser.

NASCAR CEO Brian France, the third generation in his family to run stock car racing’s governing body, sees the sport he grew up in not merely as a racing circuit, but as an entertainment empire that happens to move at 190 miles per hour. France’s sister, Lesa France Kennedy, is president of International Speedway Corp., a publicly traded company that owns or has interest in 12 racetracks around the country, all of which host Nextel Cup races. Her company is 62% controlled by the France family, making their Thanksgiving dinners akin to an industry conference. (NASCAR and ISC are headquartered in the same Daytona building.)

But what happens to NASCAR as it strives to challenge football and baseball? And more important, what happens to its core fans as the sport continues to expand? Part of the appeal to sponsors has been its distinctive, targeted base—a red-state audience with whom it’s hard for businesses with a national footprint to affiliate. “Other sports leagues would love to have those kinds of concerns,” report O’Keefe and Schlosser. “And so far, certainly, to NASCAR’s sponsors, seem unworried.”