Well it is official, Verizon Wireless said Thursday it would buy rural mobile phone service provider Alltel Corp for $28.1 billion, including debt, which would vault it to first place in the U.S. market ahead of AT&T Inc.
There is no word yet on how this is going to effect the sponsorship of the #12 Alltel Dodge, driven by Daytona 500 winner Ryan Newman, but when Sprint started the sponsorship deal with NASCAR to headline the top series, the deal was that Alltel would be "grandfathered" in. Just as Cingular Wireless was on the #31 car, but after a buyout of Cingular by AT&T the deal was off, and AT&T is gone after 2010
NASCAR's comment about this was:
"When Nextel became the title sponsor, we notified all teams that existing competing sponsorships could stay in the series indefinitely so long as there was no change in branding," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said Thursday in a statement. "This is the case with the Alltel brand – it can stay on the car indefinitely but if it transitions to Verizon or any competing company then it can no longer run a different sponsor on any car in the [Cup Series]."
0 comments:
Post a Comment