Q: Please tell us more about Brayton Laster?
A: During the week, outside of working on racecars, I spend a lot of time working for AC-Cages.com which is a company that I help run.
Over the years I’ve done all sorts of welding, fabricating, doing inventory, and picking up/placing steel orders to put together AC Cages. We’ve managed to grow it to where we have some help. Now I do work in the office and help primarily with AC Cage installations and dealing with customers.
I’ll still go into the back of the shop and pick up the welder, throw a cage together, or lay down a layer of paint. From when it was a one-man show, to now we’ve got a lot of awesome people helping us.
I’ve worked in about every position we have available. While it doesn’t pay for the racing, it does help keep my lights on and pizza on the table.
I live on the south side of Indianapolis with my girlfriend, Shelby, and our two cats, Emmy and Elly. When I’m at home, you can often find me on my computer putting together sponsorship deals, signing hero cards, or playing iRacing.
I’m also working with our nonprofit, Drive For Humanity. We try to raise items for the homeless and hungry in every city we race in. Normally, it includes putting together a food drive, working with food banks around the tracks, and putting together goodie bags to hand out to those in need.
Q: How did you get into motorsports?
A: Getting into motorsports for me was a no-brainer. Being from Indianapolis, my dad spent many years going to the Indianapolis 500. In his teens and early years, he started helping out various short-track racers around Indianapolis. Primarily the Figure 8 drivers at the Indianapolis Speedrome on the east side of Indianapolis.
After helping many drivers for years, he eventually bought his own car. He fielded a car for years for a wide variety of drivers. Once I got old enough, I hopped out of the grandstands and into a go-kart around the age of 8.
Over the years, my dad has owned a wide variety of racecars from Outlaw Figure 8 Late Models to Street Stocks and 4 Cylinders. He’s probably had over 100 different people drive for him over the years. He’s given a ton of people opportunities. It has been neat to get to work with so many people and hear stories from over the years.
Q: What’s your proudest moment as a racecar driver?
A: Winning my first-ever feature event in 2016 was a proud moment for me. I had been racing for a little over 5 years and had numerous heat race wins. I had come so close to getting a feature win but was never able to put one together.
There was one stretch where I led the feature seven weeks in a row and got spun or wrecked while leading, but that’s just short-track racing. I was finally able to put together a solid run in the summer of 2016 and lead almost every single lap en route to my first win.
It was a very dominating performance and not only my first feature win at my home track, the Indianapolis Speedrome but my first feature win in my career.
Since then, I’ve had success in various series and tracks. This includes rookie of the year and multiple top ten points finishes in Super Dirt Late Models at Brownstown Speedway. Podium points finish at Richmond Raceway (Richmond, Kentucky) and the Ultimate Heart of America Super Dirt Late Model Series in 2021.
Q: How do sponsorships work?
A: Sponsorship in NASCAR and motorsports as a whole is a tricky subject. While it comes easily for some drivers, at the end of the day, it comes down to who you know, or who you can get hold of.
Some teams operate on a $100,000 a race budget and there are a lot of smaller teams, such as ours, that operate on a less than $7,000 a race budget.
Sponsorship can be very complex and involve many twists and turns between the driver and other sponsors/companies. To simplify it, companies or brands pay money for products to advertise on a moving billboard.
We normally offer more dedicated engagements from social media promotions. Bringing employees to the track, endorsement deals, participating in giveaways, etc to bigger sponsors. That way they get more than just a logo on a racecar.
We’ll try to connect sponsors with other sponsors if we think they have products or relationships that would work well together. We just try to network with everyone so everyone walks away with a bigger return on their investment.
One of our most successful strategies is social media promotions to help sponsors grow their social media presence. At Daytona, we focus on promoting seven companies throughout the race weekend.
We used dedicated social media posts, giveaways, logos on graphics, and more, between those 7 companies. They saw an almost 3,000 follower increase over the race week. This is better than a lot of Truck, Xfinity, and even Cup sponsors saw throughout the weekend.
Q: Your ads say sponsorship can cost as little as $100. How can small sponsors make a big difference?
A: We do advertising to attract sponsorship for the season. A big part of our advertising is offering spots for as little as $100 at most of our races.
Some like to make fun of how many stickers we have on our cars, but that just means I am doing my job as a driver.
I’ll agree, sometimes it does get a little too busy, and I would love to have just one big paying sponsor to cover the entire cost of racing.
In today’s world those are few and far between, the $100 sponsorships are a huge part of getting me and the team to the track.
One single $100 sponsorship can go a long way for a smaller team such as ourselves and the Wayne Peterson Motorsports organization.
$100 will cover our team’s food or drink expenses for the weekend, it can cover one (maybe even two) motel rooms for our guys and girls to sleep in so we don’t have to sleep in our cars in the parking lot.
It helps pay for fuel and crew member expenses and a lot of the tiny stuff that all adds up very easily if you’re not careful.
Plus, the smaller companies and brands can get their logo on a real NASCAR racecar and post it on their social media pages.
While we have many really cool and big sponsorship deals for various races this season, we won’t be running many smaller sponsorships at those races. You can expect the $100 sponsorships to be alive and well here and there throughout the season to keep us rolling.
Image Sourced via Laster’s FB Page
