Autoblog

For a retiree, Michael Schumacher sure has been getting a lot of press lately. If he's not testing prototypes for Ferrari, he's taking on rivals in the Race of Champions or getting in trouble with the fuzz for driving a taxi. But the 7-time world champion is also making an awful lot of money for someone who isn't even working.

Thanks to continued partnerships with some of Schumacher's biggest sponsors, the driving superstar is expected to pull in a staggering €35 million over the next seven years, taking his sponsorship deals through 2014.

Schumi's manager Willi Weber has been hard at work maintaining the commercial relationships with such big sponsors as Shell, Omega and Deutsche Vermogenberatung. At this year's RoC, the champ wore a white, black and orange suit decked out in sponsor's logos instead of the scarlet he wore while driving for Ferrari.

[Source: F1-Live, Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty]

Over the past decade, SBC has spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing the Cingular Wireless brand name, billions more buying AT&T Wireless, switching all their customers over to Cingular, and dropping the AT&T Wireless brand. Then, when they bought the rest of AT&T as well as Bell South, and for reasons known only to some marketing genius deep in the bowels of the company, they threw away all that investment and decided to drop the Cingular brand and switch the cellular service back to AT&T.

What does any of this have to do with cars you might ask? Well it goes back to 2003 when Nextel stepped in to replace Winston as the title sponsor of NASCARs top series. Nextel didn't want their investment diluted by the presence of competitors on the cars. Cingular and Alltel were both sponsoring cars at the time and were allowed to maintain that sponsorship as long as they didn't expand it or switch teams. Of course since the Cingular brand is going away, AT&T would like to change the branding on the Richard Childress Racing #31 car and therein lies the rub. NASCAR wants to block the change to the new old new branding and AT&T is suing NASCAR to make it happen. Remember when there was once a time when racing was about who got get the finish line the fastest instead of about which company got the most screen time and mentions from commentators and drivers?

[Source: Advertising Age]

Unless we see LS 460s and Lucernes out on the greens tearing it up in a combination demolition derby-polo match, we're going back to sleep. In a snore-inducing move, Lexus has signed up with the US Golf Association to be the official vehicle of the US Open, US Women's Open, US Senior Open, and US Amateur. Lexus will also be the USGA's first-ever automotive partner. Tiger, however, will stick with Buick.

Lexus stepped up their involvement with the sport in an effort to further engage their customers, who are apparently passionate about golf. In support of their collaboration with the USGA, Lexus will be rolling out a multifaceted media campaign including advertising, direct marketing, events, and, of course, the auto brand will be on-site at USGA events. We're sure to see more Lexus branding and signage in television coverage, as well. The Lexus golf team has been expanded by the addition of some members from the Toyota team, and there's some big names playing for the brand. Lexus is actually involved in sponsoring many different types of sporting events -- polo, tennis, golf, sailing; a laundry-list of rarefied sports.

We suppose that there probably are a fair amount of Lexi in country-club parking lots, and most of them can haul a foursome's worth of clubs without a hiccup. Golf just seems so... dispassionate and indifferent from a car guy's point of view. Then again, that's the prevailing car guy notion of Lexus, as well; perhaps it really does make for a neat dovetail. Golf is not particularly easy to excel at, nor is it easy to build cars as obsessively tweezed as the Lexus lineup, but neither golf nor luxo-Toyotas get our adrenaline pumping as much as a simple parking lot autocross with something as mundane as a '91 Scoupe.

You can find the press release after the jump.

[Source: Lexus via Automotive News - sub req'd]

Evidently undeterred by the breakdown in negotiations to get himself into the Busch series, and ever-determined to make it into NASCAR one way or another, Jacques Villeneuve is making some fine progress in starting up his own team.

The former world champion has reportedly reached an agreement with Roush Racing, Ford's biggest fielder of stock cars, to help him set up his own team. After winning the Indy 500 and the CART title, JV moved to F1, and has raced for half a dozen teams since then. As such, he may have a good scope of how teams are run, but running his own team in NASCAR should present a whole new slew of challenges to the French-Canadian driver.

What the Jacques needs now is more than love, sweet love...he needs to secure $18 million in sponsorship to finance the venture. Certainly not an impossibility for a name like Villeneuve, but any way you cut it, that's a big lump of cash for a series rookie to raise on his own.

[Source: GrandPrix.com]

You may be shocked and startled to find out that Takuma Sato is among the highest-paid drivers in F1. This despite his dismal driving record, reputation as an irresponsible driver, and inability to hold on to his race seat without protection from his patrons at Honda.

Factoring in his salary from perennial backmarkers Super Aguri, plus his sponsorship contracts – which we'd assume would be substantial given Japan's love of F1 and Sato's standing as Japan's premier racing driver – Takuma pulled in an estimated $7.7 million in 2006. His new team-mate at Super Aguri, meanwhile, will be paid about $250,000 – barely a fraction of Sato's earnings.

That kind of dough puts Takuma in the same earning bracket as world champion Fernando Alonso and ahead of his old team-mate Jenson Button, among many, many other well-reputed drivers.

At this point, Autoblog would like to welcome Super Aguri to hire any member of our writing staff. There are several of us who'd be glad to crash a whole bunch of cars for you for a lot less than $7.7 million!

[Source: F1i]