On Thursday a company with exclusive licensing rights to the Nascar brand opened a car wash in Romeoville, Ill. Located about 13 miles north of Chicagoland Speedway, where the Chase for the Cup, the Sprint Cup series’ de facto playoffs, begin on Sept. 18, the car wash is the second Nascar-branded wash location to open in recent weeks in the Midwest. The opening was attended by Trevor Bayne, the 2011 Daytona 500 winner, as well as Ricky Stenhouse Jr. — two of the series’ most popular drivers who nevertheless did not qualify for the chase.
Dan Dyer, the chairman and chief executive of 1903, said in a telephone interview that some existing structures in the company’s portfolio would merely undergo “a reflagging,” with new signage and an overhauled branding, while in other cases Mr. Dyer’s company and its partner investors would build Nascar Car Wash locations from the ground up.
“The people who work there all wear Nascar uniforms and T-shirts,” Mr. Dyer said. “And if the customer gets the full service, the guys swarm around kind of like a pit crew when they come out and do everything they do.”
The next Nascar Car Wash is expected to open in Aurora, Ill., Mr. Dyer said, followed by another in Grand Rapids, Mich. Locations in the Illinois cities of Joliet and Naperville are expected to open early next year.
Beyond the wash itself, the locations will also sell select Nascar merchandise, Mr. Dyer said. Inventories, however, won’t fluctuate with the fortunes of the sport’s drivers.
“Mostly we’ll be encouraging customers to go to the Nascar superstore online,” he said. “Nascar fans are pretty driver-centric. When you have 65 drivers and 65 numbers it’s pretty hard to inventory all that stuff.”
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