Chip Bowers has worked for the front office of a sports dynasty with the Warriors and been president of the agency Elevate, but earlier this month he was at a NASCAR race track setting up a pit crew cart for the first time in his life. Now serving as president of RFK Racing, Bowers thinks that the team needs to be more aggressive and intentional in partnering with NASCAR and operating with a championship mindset, and he’s getting his hands dirty literally to underscore the commitment he feels is needed. At Phoenix Raceway on the day of the championship race earlier this month, Bowers set up the pit box that a pit crew uses. He later told SBJ at the team’s fleet of 18-wheel transporters: “We have to set the standard that we expect the rest of the organization to operate — if I’m not willing to go put together a pit box, which I did earlier this morning — then how can I ask somebody else to go out there and support one of our partners when we have a need? So that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
Hired in September after former president Steve Newmark announced in July that he was leaving to become the AD-in-waiting at UNC, Bowers is in his first full-time job in NASCAR but still oversees both the business and competition sides of RFK. Bowers is quick to note that he won’t be meddling unnecessarily on the competition side, and he praised Newmark, saying he has reached out to him for advice a couple of times already. But Bowers also struck a tone that suggests he has uncovered levers to pull to attempt to grow RFK further off the track and deliver the team’s first premier series title on it since 2004 with Kurt Busch. He’s already been getting to know current team sponsors, talking with prospective ones, meeting NASCAR industry executives and his staff, and sitting on twice-a-week calls with the other presidents of Fenway Sports Group properties in Liverpool, the Red Sox and the Penguins.
BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS: Prior to the interview with SBJ, Bowers chased down NASCAR EVP Tim Clark in the garage at Phoenix to discuss a business item, an example of how he’s already building relationships with the league office. “NASCAR has done a really good job over the last few years of building really good content with their media partners, continuing to expand that and really tap into the stories that are happening with every single race team — not just a select few — because there’s some really good stories there,” he said. “We’re going to be very active, I’ve spent a lot of time with our friends Tim Clark and others at NASCAR to talk about what we’re doing, I think we as a team have to take it upon ourselves to proactively come to NASCAR, share intel about who we are, what we’re doing, who we want to be and how we’re going to go about doing it, so that they’re thinking about us on a regular basis so that, as they uncover opportunities, they come to us first. We want everybody to share in success, but we want to be a thought leader — so if we can be out front and show people the way, then we’re going to take that responsibility seriously.”
STRONG RESUME: In addition to the Warriors, Bowers has worked for the Marlins, Magic, SuperSonics and Padres. Said Bowers: “When I got to the Warriors, we were coming off a lottery team that Steph (Curry) had had ankle troubles — we weren’t expected to win. And what I learned in that experience is you operate on a parallel path truly believing on the competition side that they’re going to achieve their objective, and we’ve got to be as a business prepared to take full advantage of that, and we’re going to do that at RFK Racing.”
