When Tommy Joe Martins saw Kaden Honeycutt, back in 2022, Alpha Prime Racing was just getting started in the NASCAR O’Reilly. Martins spoke to Honeycutt’s agent and came back convinced the kid had something special. He believed in the talent completely. What he did not have was a way to pay for it.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
That gap between believing in a driver and actually putting them in a car is exactly what Martins thinks is broken about NASCAR’s financial model.
“The team is always the one left standing there without leverage,” Martins said during an appearance on the Gluckcast Podcast.
Alpha Prime is a two-car Chevrolet program in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, co-owned by Martins and Caesar Bacarella. But Martins highlighted that their realistic annual budget is between $2.5 million and $3 million, while teams at the front spend $6 million or more.
To survive in NASCAR, small teams have two options. They can sell race weekends to a sponsor and choose whoever they want to drive. Or they can sell those same weekends to a driver who brings their own funding. The problem is that the first option, a sponsor simply backing a team, has disappeared.
“Sponsors have gotten away from ‘We’re just going to support this team.’ That doesn’t really happen anymore,” Martins added. “They support drivers, and then they move around with those drivers.”
That removed whatever little leverage small NASCAR teams once had. When sponsors follow drivers instead of teams, the team becomes replaceable. And a replaceable team cannot afford to gamble on unproven talent, no matter how good that talent is.
NASCAR prize money goes directly to team owners, not drivers. Top-tier drivers negotiate a base salary plus 35% to 50% of race earnings. At the O’Reilly Series level, many drivers race for free, taking only whatever small cut remains after the team covers tires, travel, and parts.
For Alpha Prime Racing, 40% or more of the total budget must come from sponsorship. Martins said they operate at around 60% covered, meaning they are already running short before a single race weekend begins. The only thing they have left to sell, as he puts it, is race weekends, leaving them almost no room for a talented but unfunded young driver.
Getting into NASCAR today requires money before it requires skill. Running a developmental season in ARCA or the Truck Series costs anywhere from $500,000 to over $1.5 million. That money almost always comes from personal family wealth or self-funded business backing.
Small teams like Alpha Prime are caught in the middle. They cannot afford to take a chance on a young driver with no funding. But when a young driver shows promise and attracts a sponsor, bigger teams simply take them.
Small teams do the development work. Larger teams collect the results. Martins was direct about what that meant for a driver like Honeycutt.
“How am I supposed to put him in a race car?” he said. “It’s not that I didn’t believe in him. I absolutely thought he was going to end up being really good.”
Belief, it turns out, does not cover the bills.