NASCAR, with it’s 500 lap races and dozens of cars on the track, can make for a great gambling day, if the right amount of data reaches sports books. With the season about to begin, NASCAR and it’s partners have built up their product to make for great action, and Scott Warfield, the managing director of gaming, joined our Becky Liggero Fontana to talk about it.
A huge part of NASCAR’s push to be a great gambling product meant evolving from the two common lines offered on a race. “So BetGenius are building a live, in-race betting product for us that will kind of transform how people view sports, view NASCAR,” Warfield said. “So in traditionally, NASCAR’s been a two bet type sport, race winner and series champion. Pretty static, pretty stale type bet type. Moving forward, we hope that list is 30, 40 different bet types. Things like number of lead changes, number of leaders, head to head driver matchups, over/under car numbers, all in a live, kind of dynamic experience that can change as things on the track unfold. And we have 400-500 laps, all pretty discrete betting opportunities. So we’re excited about that product build and what it could mean for the sports book operators.”
But with added betting types, there’s always the question of integrity. NASCAR has that covered by a previous partnership. “So we signed Sportradar as our integrity partner back in 2018,” Warfield pointed out. “They came in, and continue to come in, do a lot of fraud detection monitoring, and education sessions with our tracks and our teams and our drivers, all of our stakeholders. This is a sport that fans are very, very passionate about, but at the end of the day, this is always going to be the core product of cars in circles. Sometimes, cars on road courses sports betting, it’s an engagement tool for us, but first and foremost, it’s going to be about protecting the integrity of the product.”
Liggero Fontana took all this talk of partnerships to ask Warfield how NASCAR decides on a potential deal. “It’s not too dissimilar than how we look for any sort of partner in the sponsorship space,” he answered. “We want partners that are going to come in and help us grow the sport. I think we have a tremendous amount of assets we can bring to the table to help drive revenue to sports books. But at the same time, we’re looking for sports books to get creative, innovative, offer new bet types, help us grow the handle, help drive engagement, tune in for our races. So a true, equitable partnership that’s white boarded based on the partner.
FInally, Warfield talked about the future he sees for cars going in circles. “The big watermark is Daytona 500, which is our biggest race,” he noted. “It kicks off the season in February. That’s when the BetGenius full product build will be available. And from there, I think you’ll see a flurry of news from us with different operators and getting creative on, again, different bet types and different ways to engage around free-to-play games but also paid games, so we’re excited.”
