After Davis’ father retired in 2005, he and Marc left family and friends behind and relocated to Mooresville, North Carolina, where many of the Nascar teams have their headquarters—a move they considered a necessary sacrifice to reach the next level. While Davis was establishing himself as one of the best young drivers in the country, Joe Gibbs Racing was searching for a way to recruit more minorities. Years before Siegel became president of Dale Earnhardt Inc., he and a friend, N.F.L. Hall of Famer Reggie White, wanted to start a Nextel Cup team with a minority driver. Because of the prohibitively high costs and the challenge of finding sponsors for an untested team, their plans never materialized. Ultimately, White formed an alliance with Joe Gibbs Racing and started its diversity program, which held its first scouting combine in 2003. After White’s untimely death from cardiac arrhythmia in December 2004, J.D. Gibbs, Joe Gibbs Racing’s president, forged ahead with the program, though he doesn’t harbor any illusions of finding a quick fix for Nascar’s diversity problem. Bringing up a young driver “is so expensive, no matter what your background,” Gibbs says. “The diversity side just takes time. You’ve got to find some young guys and train them.”

It was while racing almost every weekend at Hickory that Davis, 15 at the time, first came to Gibbs’ attention. “Our guys saw him and said, ‘He doesn’t have much in the way of equipment, but he’s running really well with what he’s got. We’d better keep an eye on him,’ ” Gibbs recalls. Davis’ performance earned him a six-year contract. But getting a ride with an established team is easier than finding sponsors, especially when race is added to the mix. For Nascar’s three top-tier series—Craftsman, Nationwide (formerly Busch), and Sprint Cup, as the Nextel Cup will be called in the 2008 season—the single-season price tag for sponsors is roughly $4 million, $8 million, and $20 million, respectively, to cover the cost of multiple cars, drivers’ salaries, and pit crews. (Sponsors pay more for exposure in the huge, nationally televised races like the Nextel Cup Series.)

Gibbs doesn’t view the difficulty in lining up sponsors as a strictly racial matter but rather one of corporate priorities. Compared with the Nationwide and Nextel series, Craftsman draws far fewer spectators, and Nascar’s rookie-development series attracts an even smaller number of fans. Corporations are understandably reluctant to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for so little exposure. Gibbs notes that he’s had no better luck getting a sponsor for racing phenom Joey Logano, whom he signed around the same time as Davis. At 17, Logano, a white Connecticut native, was the youngest driver ever to win the Busch East Series. Yet despite Logano’s record, Gibbs couldn’t secure backing for him and ended up sponsoring both him and Davis on his own. “Everybody wants to be a part of something new, different, and great. I think once Marc gets some momentum and makes a name for himself, we’ll get the sponsors for him,” Gibbs says.

Nascar’s efforts to reel in Hispanic fans seem to be faring somewhat better, in part because Indianapolis 500 champ Juan Pablo Montoya defected from Formula One to the circuit. Before a 2007 race at California Speedway, in suburban Los Angeles, racetrack officials covered bodegas and cafés with Montoya posters and hung advertisements on thousands of doors in Hispanic neighborhoods. All displayed a toll-free number that, when called, played an invitation to the race from Montoya in Spanish. Similarly, when Montoya raced at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, in Florida, Nascar set up a special Montoya-rooting section in the grandstand.