NASCAR driver who plowed into a Sargento sign will drive car sponsored by cheese company
NASCAR driver Josh Bilicki managed to turn a mild but hilarious in-race disaster into a sponsorship opportunity, and it's perfect.
Bilicki has spent most of the 2022 NASCAR season racing in the premier Cup Series, but he's also competed in a handful of second-tier Xfinity Series races, one of which was at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin over Fourth of July weekend.
During that Road America race, Bilicki was involved in a mid-race incident. He was uninjured, but we can't really say the same for the Sargento cheese sign he ended up taking out and driving around with on the nose of his car. Amid this chaos, Bilicki wound up off the track and plowed into this Sargento sign:
This cheese-sign debris is perhaps one of the most Wisconsin things ever…
“As soon as I got out of the car and looked at social media, it was blowing up,” Bilicki said. “There was a meme, people all over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram were sharing it. A couple of hours later at dinner, I saw they had made their (Facebook) background picture into me hitting the sign, so I knew they saw the value in it and knew they wanted to have fun with it.”
Well, this hilarious moment from early last month has come full circle for Bilicki. Wednesday, Alpha Prime Racing announced that Sargento Foods Inc. is partnering with Bilicki and the team to sponsor the No. 45 Chevrolet in the Xfinity Series race at Watkins Glen International in New York on Saturday, August 20.
Bilicki inadvertently gave Sargento free advertising at Road America in July, and now, it's working out pretty well for him.
“I’ve actually been working on securing Sargento cheese for the last six, seven, eight years, even before my time in NASCAR,” said Bilicki, who has thousands of laps around Road America in Elkhart Lake, just a few miles from the company’s headquarters in Plymouth. “I’ve talked with (CEO) Louie Gentine a couple of times and just never had luck.”
Here's a look at his paint scheme for the upcoming Xfinity race:
Contributing: Dave Kallmann, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel