“Shake and Bake?”…”If you’re not first, you’re last.” NASCAR racer Kurt Busch brought the sport’s greatest movie spoof to life. Sort of.
His Phoenix Racing team didn’t have a sponsor for this weekend’s Sprint Cup race at the Talladega Superspeedway, the Aaron’s 499, so Kurt Busch’s girlfriend Patricia Driscoll, came up with an idea while watching the Will Ferrell comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
And the awesome paint scheme is all for a good cause. See the pics after the jump. From Sporting News:
Driscoll, the president and executive director of the Armed Forces Foundation, wanted her boyfriend to run the “Me” cougar paint scheme from the 2006 movie to help promote the foundation.
“Why leave the car blank when we could do something to promote the foundation?” she said Friday. “So a few months ago, we started talking about this and I decided we were going to do this and I would convince (team owner James) Finch and everybody else they would follow.”
The idea was easy. Getting the decals and words from the movie on the car? Not so much.
Executives at Sony, which produced the film, politely declined the request. But Driscoll was undeterred.
The producers of a documentary the foundation is doing on post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans knew executives at Sony, who eventually granted approval.
Problem solved? Not exactly.
Driscoll also had to obtain permission from writer and actor Will Ferrell, the owners of the cougar and the photographer.
Finally, after two months of phone calls and pleading for permission, they got approval by everyone involved. The paint scheme includes a number to text to donate to the foundation.
Busch isn’t the first NASCAR personality to be influenced by the film. Pastor Joe Nelms gave a prayer before a race last summer thanking Jesus for auto parts, Toyotas, Fords, his “smoking hot wife.” Essentially ripping off Bobby’s saying of grace during the dinner table scene. Busch memorized lines from the film and encouraged his crew to quote dialogue from the film in their communications, just as he planned to do.
Even put a stuffed cougar in the car, and placed a second in pit row as a mascot. So how did the Cougar decorated “Me” car do today at Talladega? At lap 182, Busch spun out the wrong way on the tri-oval. He left the race with 7 laps remaining.
Paul M. Banks is CEO of The Sports Bank.net, an official Google News site generating millions of unique visitors. He’s also a regular contributor to Chicago Now, Walter Football.com, Yardbarker, MSN and Fox Sports
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