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Forrest Lucas: The Man Behind Racing’s Grand Plans

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64 AUTOWEEK MARCH 3, 2014

COMP \\ FORREST LUCAS

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Forrest Lucas, founderand chief of Lucas Oil.

FORREST LUCAS IS SLOW-ly but surely buying up racingseries, racetracks and themedium of television, whilesponsoring race cars across

America. You can’t go to a dirt track, a drag strip or, increasingly, a giantpaved oval without seeing “Lucas Oil”plastered all over. Consider this “short”list of some of the entities Lucas owns,sponsors or promotes:

The Lucas Oil American Sprint CarSeries; Lucas Oil Midwest LatemodelRacing Association; Lucas Oil LateModel Dirt Series; Lucas Oil Drag BoatRacing Series; Lucas Oil Pro PullingLeague; Lucas Oil B-Mods; Lucas Oil Modified Series; Lucas Oil ProMotocross Championship; Lucas OilOff Road Racing Series; NHRA LucasOil Drag Racing Series; Geico Motor-cycle EnduroCross; POWRi RacingPerformance Open Wheel Racing Inc.;Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo.;and the Lucas Oil I-10 Speedway inBlythe, Calif. In addition, Lucas Oil’ssponsorship of IndyCar’s race at AutoClub Speedway in California is in itsthird year. IndyCar team owner Sam

Schmidt has had a long, mutually pros-perous sponsorship from the company.

Those are the obvious deals. Thereare zillions of other little setups all overthe country and around the world—some 700 racers carry the name on theirrides—that one way or another traceback to Lucas Oil Products Inc. and thepromotion thereof.

But what is Lucas Oil, the stuff onwhich your motorsports future coulddepend? Outside of Forrest Lucas him-self and maybe a chemist or two deep in the basement of company HQ inCorydon, Ind., no one seems to know.

Lucas claims that while looking for a way to increase the durability of hislong-haul trucking fleet 30 or so yearsago, he stumbled across a barrel of dis-carded fluid left behind a building in an industrial section somewhere inSouthern California. He says he usedthis discarded oily substance to make—with no background in chemistry,physics, engineering, fluid dynamics, ultimate Frisbee or voodoo economics—a substance that outperformed whateverthe best minds and biggest budgets ofthe 100-year-old, multitrillion-dollar

MARCH 3, 2014 AUTOWEEK 65

WHAT ISFORREST LUCASGOING TOBUY NEXT?

And is he making racing betteror worse? In any case, prepare to be the media

love slaves of Lucas Oil BY MARK VAUGHN

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petroleum industry had everproduced.

Lucas Oil downplays theproduct’s discovery and develop-ment and the specifics of itschemical makeup. Technically,it’s a secret. But you have onlyto read the label to see that itcarries near-miraculous andseemingly contradictory bene-fits. For instance, reading thefirst product description wecame across at lucasoil.com, wesee that “Lucas Heavy Duty OilStabilizer” appears ready for usein engines, transmissions anddifferentials. How can one prod-uct go in all three of those me-chanical things? The descriptionsays—try reading it aloud andinsert, “My friends, I tell youthat Lucas Heavy Duty OilStabilizer …”— “controls noise,heat and wear in manual trans-missions and differentials … isformulated to eliminate drystarts and reduce friction, heatand wear in any type of engine.It allows motor oils a higher de-gree of lubricity, which reducesoil consumption and operatingtemperatures. Use Lucas OilStabilizer in gear oil to stopleaks, reduce operating temperatures andincrease the life of gear oil …” (It bothincreases lubricity and stops leaks? Wearen’t saying that it doesn’t, but thissounds amazing.)

That’s just the marketing info for one bottle. There are more than 100 dif-ferent products. Do they actually work?Anecdotal evidence and a quick surveyof user websites that offer an opinion ofLucas Oil products suggests they do,with far more claims of success thanfailure. But for our purposes today, itdoesn’t matter if the work.

What matters is that Lucas has builtan empire on the stuff and is using mo-torsports to promote it, to the immensebenefit of grass-roots racers everywhere.

The grass-roots organizations affectedby Lucas seem pretty happy about therelationship. In addition to sponsorshipmoney, Lucas organizes the various se-ries and broadcasts them on his owntelevision network, MAVTV (“ChannelSurfing,” Aug. 19, 2013). So series andtracks get money, organization, manage-ment and promotion in a mutually bene-

ficial relationship that is building steam.“One of the biggest accomplishments

is bringing the different associationsunder one umbrella,” said Ken Dollar,director of the Lucas Oil Drag BoatRacing Series. “Before [Lucas’ involve-ment], it was all a regional thing.”

“They’ve added to the point fund and stepped up with other sponsorshipsto national teams,” said Matt Ward, national coordinator of the Lucas OilAmerican Sprint Car Series. “They’vehelped out drivers in the regional series, too.”

In many cases, what had been region-al series with their own rule books andtech inspections were brought togetherunder a single set of regulations, codify-ing standards and streamlining the inter-changeability of national competitors.Safety has benefitted, too, with informa-tion and training for rescue crews. And,“They’re nice people,” Ward offered.

What is the point? As far as anyonecan tell, and despite what a hundredbusiness school case studies might tellyou about leveraging your

assets and making ridiculousmoney at all costs—then gutting and abandoning whatyou’ve created and buyingjunk bonds and mistresseswith the proceeds—it appearsLucas Oil’s empire is aimed atsimply selling more Lucas Oil.

Nothing more. Crazy, no?Before 71-year-old Lucas

was a successful businessman,he was a young entrepreneurstruggling to make a living inthe rural Midwest. His firstproduct promotion came whenhe was 9 years old sellingWhite Cloverine Salve door to door.

“I bought my BB gun withthat,” Lucas recalled during aninterview last November inthe Lucas Oil Top Fuel trailerat the NHRA Finals inPomona, Calif., where his sonMorgan was racing.

White Cloverine Salve isstill available in drug stores. Isthat what got him into the oilbusiness?

“I learned a lot by selling,”Lucas said, and by talking toother salesmen when he sub-sequently got jobs peddling

Fuller brushes and Singer sewing machines.

When he was 21, he bought his firstsemitruck and started hauling loads forMayflower movers, where he learned an-other thing or two not only about thelimits of high-mileage internal-combus-tion engines but about the people whosehouseholds he transported.

“I got to move a lot of company presi-dents and generals and people like that,so I studied those people really hard, andone thing I noticed, the guys who madeit all the way to the top were reallynice—they were nice to their wives,they were nice to their children and theywere nice to me. You get only halfwayup the ladder, and those guys weren’t al-ways nice. That’s a very important les-son I got. As I started my company, Itried to be nice to my people. As I’vegrown, those kind of people come to meand they, in turn, become me again tothe people below them. You won’t find arude person anywhere in our employ.”

So that explains the niceness. But itwasn’t the only thing that led to sales


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success. Marketing did, even thoughwhen Lucas Oil products went on sale in1989, there wasn’t a promotions budget.

“We started out with nothing,” Lucassaid. “We didn’t start out with a wholelot of [advertising] money where we’regonna blitz the whole country [with adsall] at once.”

This is where another Forrest Lucasquality came in, as he is something of amarketing genius. Consider his first,low-budget step: As Lucas peddled hisoil to auto-parts stores and truck stopsacross the country, he began leaving lit-tle “gear demonstrators” on countertops.There were two sets of three plasticgears, one set lubricated with Lucas Oiland one with something else. You couldcrank the gears and feel how much easi-er the Lucas-lubricated ones moved thanthe others. Apparently no one ques-tioned the viscosity of oil on the othergears; they just noticed the Lucas gearsmoved easier.

“It worked,” Lucas said of the geardemonstrators.

So that got sales off the ground. Nextcame race-car sponsorships.

“When I saw a race car going downthe road [on a trailer], I’d always look at it. I couldn’t help but look at it.Everybody looks at it.”

And they looked at them on the track,too, of course. So he figured he shouldstart writing “Lucas Oil” on them in bigred letters that you’ve probably seen 12times already today. That worked, too.

“We sponsored a guy with a sprint car in Arkansas and a guy with a pickuptruck, and we put ’em on there, and itworked.”

But it would work better if more peo-ple could see the sprint car and thetruck. Hence, television.

“We did have a period of time whenthe [NASCAR] Southwest Tour was get-ting on some television stations. Theyhad a little end-of-the-year race with fourtelevision shows on ESPN. ‘The WinterHeat.’ Greg Biffle was running in it. Wehad a car in it.”

But not just any car.“We had the in-car-camera car, which

cost a lot of money at the time, $4,000.”If he was going to pay $4,000 to spon-

sor the in-car-camera car, Lucas wantedto make sure he got his money’s worthand that the camera was aimed properly.

“I was always in there making sure itwas placed just right and picking up our

logo. That was enough to let me see thattelevision did work.”

So if television worked, the next logi-cal step was to control television.

“I realized several years ago that peo-ple were starting to [skip] the commer-cials,” Lucas said. “So I said, ‘We neededto be in the TV show itself, more so than just be on a car. Some of these rac-ing series that are weak and for sale arefalling apart. We should pick ’em up and make ’em a Lucas Oil series. Thatwould guarantee that we’re goin’ ta’ bein the show.”

So Lucas Oil started buying series andgetting involved with sponsorship on asmall cable TV station that, at the time,was known as MavTV(it would later becomeMAVTV). Before Lucasbought MavTV in 2011,Mav stood for Maverick.It was aimed at the low-est-common-denomina-tor male audience. Likesome of the racing se-ries, MavTV wasn’tdoing so well whenLucas started dealingwith it, and it got steadi-ly worse. Eventually,MavTV was close to fail-ing. So it looked like agood deal for a buyer.And Lucas is one heckof a buyer.

Here’s another ofLucas’ great businessqualities: He doesn’t payretail for anything. Everything from hismansion and cattle ranch in Missouri tohis Citation Bravo business jet and hisrailroad (yes, he owns a railroad), he getsfor pennies on the dollar, or a million onthe 10 million. And he always pays cash.He is proud of never having borrowedmoney to build his empire. So by thetime he bought MavTV—for cash, duh—the entity was almost going under, andhe got a great deal.

He got cameras and editing equip-ment under similar fire-sale terms whenthe company that used to shoot his com-mercials went under and sold him thegear cheap. Then he trained the guysfrom the oil-business loading dock to operate the stuff, and voilà, he had a TVstation for relatively nothing. At thatpoint, Lucas moved the whole MAVTVenterprise—now all caps with MAV

standing for Movies, Action and Var-iety—not into a towering Burbank high-rise like Disney or Warner Bros. mighthave done, but into a dilapidated 1920sformer Sunkist lemon-squeezing plant inCorona, Calif., that he got (surprise!) at agreatly reduced price in 2001.

“A man and woman owned it; theyhad split up. We picked it up prettycheap—cash.”

Lucas and his people spent a year fix-ing up the place and started using it forthe oil business part of the company, butthey eventually moved the TV stuff in,too. Now it’s packed with video-editingbooths upstairs and pallets stacked withoil additives downstairs. And the video

content the crew pro-duces is all either LucasOil-sponsored grass-roots motorsports, somemovies aimed at thesame male demographicthat likes grass-rootsmotorsports, and someoriginal programming,the most popular of thelatter being somethingcalled “High TechRednecks.”

“Roughly a millionhouseholds tune in to[‘High Tech Rednecks’]on Friday, which is notbad for an independentnetwork of our size,”said Bob Patison,MAVTV president and such a dead ringer

for Kenny Rogers that, at any moment,you expect him to pull a microphone out of his desk drawer and start singing,“Now every gambler knows that the secret to surviving …”

But Patison speaks in the measured,considered tones of a lawyer, which hewas before he became a TV executive.And judging from MAVTV’s growth,he’s a darn good TV exec.

Indeed, MAVTV will soon be avail-able in more than 60 million Americanhouseholds. It’s now available fromComcast, Charter, Dish Network, TimeWarner Cable and a number of othersuppliers. Some cable providers offer itas part of their basic package. Others re-quire that you pay more for it, from $3to $20 or so. Your price may vary. Butit’s available all across North America,including Canada, Alaska and Hawaii.


“When I saw a race car going

down the road [on a trailer], I’d always look at it.

I couldn’t helpbut look at it.

Everybodylooks at it.”

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One reason it’s taking off has to do with something neither Lucas norPatison could possibly have predicted (or could they have???)—the demise ofSpeed Channel as a source of racing coverage. MAVTV just happened to beon the rise as, last August, Speed wentthrough its transformation from all-NASCAR-all-the-time to the generalsports programming of Fox Sports 1.That left grass-roots circle-track fans tomigrate a couple channels over to jointhe MAV empire.

Motorsports remains MAV’s maincontent. Patison estimates that about 15 percent of the U.S. population is race fans, and most of those would liketo watch the circle-track/sprint-car/drag-boat racing series that are featuredon MAVTV.

In other words, MAV motorsports isstill very much at the grass-roots level. Itdoesn’t broadcast the Daytona 500 or theIndianapolis 500. And while many pun-dits who become outraged every timeESPN bumps an NHRA broadcast due tocollege football or a NASCAR racewould say the NHRA should get onMAVTV, MAV might not be ready tomake even that jump just yet. Don’tlook for IndyCar to make any broadcast-ing deals with MAV yet, either. But thedirection of growth suggests that some-day such a scenario wouldn’t be out ofthe question. Maybe in five or 10 years.

MAVTV is not in any hurry to grow toofast and make mistakes. Lucas is still focused on selling oil, after all.

“Grass roots is still the backbone ofwhat we do,” Patison said.

You might think that finding an audi-ence like that would take a lot of expen-sive marketing studies.

“Nope. None,” revealed Patison.“Common sense tells you who they are. We live that lifestyle, we go to theraces. Just about everybody here is aracer or a race supporter in one way oranother. You live that lifestyle and youinherently know who your customer is.You don’t need a fancy research team totell you what you already know.”

There are some variations in the rac-ing coverage, but not much. Youngerviewers tend to like motocross and off-road racing, so MAVTV has a lot of that.

There are 26 shows listed on theMAVTV website in the categories ofLifestyle and Action & Adventure, thenthere’s Mixed Martial Arts, Movies andVariety, and Live Events such as theChili Bowl, which took place Jan. 18.MAVTV signed a deal recently with thedean of motorsports TV journalists,Dave Despain, to host five live broad-casts that began with the Chili Bowl,and a series of half-hour interviews.MAVTV is also where you can watchthe World Rally Championship, PirelliWorld Challenge, “Best in the Desert,”

AMA Flat Track and a drifting showcalled “Drift Style.” Chances are there is a version of every motorsport here.

And if not, other variety programmingranges from bull riding to poker, “Dream Car Garage” to “Catch andCook.” There are even “Starsky &Hutch” reruns.

But all of it, everything from the rac-ing and racetracks to the TV station andeven the $122 million, 20-year namingrights deal to Lucas Oil Stadium wherethe NFL’s Colts play in Indianapolis, isstill aimed not at becoming a major play-er in media, which Lucas could probablybecome, eventually, but at selling the oilstuff. And not just here in America, butaround the world.

“MAVTV will be international,” saidPatison. “MAVTV Global launching inMonterrey [Mexico] is not an accident.We’ve had very strong Lucas Oil salesgrowth in Mexico, and this is a mecha-nism for us to support that. We have expansion plans for Brazil, so we’re dis-cussing television distribution with anumber of parties that service the mar-ket. We’re trying to strategically placethe MAVTV growth in areas of theworld that also sell Lucas Oil.”

Then there are Asia and Africa; any-where a satellite signal can beam videoof a circle-track race, boat-jump contestor biker stomp is a prime target.

“We sell a lot in Mongolia, Congo and Tasmania,” Lucas said.

Earlier, during our discussion at theNHRA Finals, Lucas pointed to aniPhone 4 on a table and said it would bethe means to get MAVTV into ThirdWorld countries and around the world.

“When you’re ready for a new phone,some company will take your old phoneand sell it to someplace where it will be the new, latest and greatest thing,”Lucas said, his eyes lighting up in antici-pation. “I’m betting if [the phone’s newowner] can find a place to charge it up,that will be their entertainment. Theygot Internet through the phone, but theywill also have TV through the Internet.American racing will be available toeverybody in the world.”

Everybody in the world will watchracing with Lucas Oil sponsorship.

So keep an eye on Lucas & Co. Youmight find yourself calling your cableprovider and echoing the words of anoth-er once-small cable startup and saying,“I want my MAVTV!” c


Lucas’ wife, Charlotte, is his partner in ventures including video production, racing series andracetracks, cattle ranching, and, of course, the oil products that have funded an empire.

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