"The most important thing I have is credibility," Bill Quirk tells me. "All it takes is one time, and that credibility is shot -- and then I've got nothing."
These are the words a PR man must live by, and Quirk has done the job.
Spend any amount of time in the newspaper business, and you'll quickly lose track of the hundreds of PR people who aren't worth the threads in their own shoelaces. The flip side of that equation, of course, is that you can count on one hand the number of people who excel in the position.
Quirk is one of those people I count on my hand. Problem is, PASS doesn't always see the need for someone who is media savvy.
At some point last season, Quirk and PASS had a falling out. Quirk isn't usually one to tell tales out of school -- particularly to some snot-nosed little racing writer -- so the details of that divorce have remained somewhat muddled. Suffice it to say, through piecing it all together from a variety of sources, Quirk and PASS president Tom Mayberry disagreed on a few things, Mayberry turned to the bigger PR monster at 51 Sports and Quirk was out.
While Quirk was out, a few things happened in 2007. Or, better said, a few things failed to happen -- namely, press releases and results were not getting out to media outlets. If you weren't willing to subject yourself to what Speed51.com purports to be journalism and motorsports coverage (you know, as long as you're one of its clients), you could find the results a day or so later.
At races, there were no entry lists, no media kits, no starting lineups and, if you weren't quick enough to tackle a scorer with a copy of the finishing order before they left the tower, no results. From April through mid-June at Unity Raceway, I received exactly ZERO in the way of literature from PASS.
For those of you that may or may not care, that's no correspondence on behalf of PASS with the one media member who regularly covers its events. You can read between the lines.
On Sunday morning July 1st, my first interaction of any kind with a PASS PR representative came as the sun was coming up. That morning, I'd written about how
Kyle Busch had been wrongly credited with a PASS North Series win less than 6 hours earlier at All-Star Speedway.
A few minutes before 7 a.m., Bob Dillner approached me in the media center at New Hampshire International Speedway. Diller, the SPEED Channel reporter covering the Nextel Cup Series, is the founder of 51 Sports and, as of then, handling PR for PASS.
After first telling me he hadn't actually read the entire article (uh, rule no. 1, Bob, at least do the author the service of reading something in its entirety before quibbling with it), he told me what I wrote was wrong (again, without having read all of it) and followed up by lecturing me on how I should have done my job. Imagine that -- the guy who erroneously broke the story in 2006 of Richard Childress Racing teams using tricked-up shocks in the 1st race of the Chase that year lecturing me on responsible journalism. It was laughable.
I told Dillner that until PASS reversed its decision, I was absolutely right. Dillner said that something would likely come about "in the next few days." I said until that happened, I wasn't going to back off my story. Dillner told me he hoped I'd write something more positive when a decision was announced. I told him I always called it like I saw it.
Two hours later,
Mike Rowe was officially credited with that victory as Busch was stripped. I did not hear a word from PASS (or Dillner) in the aftermath. PASS has since (in a good move) divorced itself from Dillner's 51 Sports.
The next time I heard anything from PASS? When Mayberry asked Quirk to help him out with some press releases in August.
Not coincidentally, PASS coverage has been easier to come by in newspapers, in trade papers and on the Web since Quirk was brought back into the fold. There have been timely press releases and results from PASS, not just for the Super Late Models, but also for the Modified and Sportsman divisions, too, which were essentially ignored previously.
The upgrade in coverage is entirely Quirk's doing, and it shouldn't be overlooked. Officially, Quirk still doesn't have a job with the series -- he's simply being used as a "PR consultant."
It's time to remove that label and put him on the payroll. ACT gets a ton of attention in New England, in part, because its PR staff is second-to-none when it comes to being both accessible and personable. They have information, they are willing to share it, and they are available when you need anything and everything, both at the race track and away from it.
Without someone like Quirk, PASS boasts none of the above. With someone like Quirk, the media remains more inclined to pay attention to all of your series, because they know where to turn when they have questions.
The job of a PR man can't be an afterthought, not when people have so many entertainment choices these days. A PR man who's on the job can have a direct impact on the perception of a series.
In these parts, there are few in that group.
This was supposed to be the year in which Cassius Clark and his team ended the Ben Rowe-Johnny Clark stranglehold on the PASS North Series championship. Fresh off a 2006 in which Clark drove his Ed Chapman-owned car to more victories than anyone else, the team was by and large the pre-season favorite.
