![]() “I did actually follow him for a bit on Instagram and see what’s going on. He had never heard of Brown until #LGB became a phenomenon. Kevin Raccioppi of Deerfield Beach had an anti-Biden flag and Trump flags flying from his camping spot in the Daytona infield and said he had a new favorite driver. “If I’m in my street clothes, I’m just another guy.” “If I’m in the race suit, everybody knows who I am,” Brown said. There are no autograph hounds like collectors who chase Cup drivers.īut outside the fence, Brown is a folk hero. He walked the garage in Daytona in anonymity, the outside noise nonexistent as he plopped his helmet on top of his car and talked to his crew. “We’ve got to get to the Cup Series somehow.” “We don’t want to stop here,” Brown said. Without a tie to the elite teams in the Cup Series, like Team Penske or Joe Gibbs Racing, losing sponsorship would be a death knell to his career. “Mistakes may have been made in choosing a new sponsor instead of sticking with the companies that got him to victory lane,” Reynolds said. ![]() Reynolds was upset that his company had stood by Brown - only to be left behind in the whirlwind of confusion surrounding the LGBCoin sponsorship announcement. Vic Reynolds, the company’s co-founder, cut ties with Brown in January in the aftermath of the LGBCoin fallout and wrote, “all money is not good money.” The Original Larry’s Hard Lemonade Brewing Company sponsored Brown on his Talladega car and filmed a celebratory commercial shortly after the win. You know, a crypto coin capitalizing on the “Let’s Go Brandon” craze. Brown said he was determined not to capitalize on his newfound notoriety until he announced in December a full-season deal with LGBCoin. “I would like it to become a constructive voice for those like myself, who land somewhere in the middle and have views that align with both sides.”īrown drives for underfunded and undermanned Brandonbilt Motorsports team owned by his father, and the big-buck sponsorships that prop up teams in the series have been hard to find. “For me, a big goal was and still is to change the narrative of what LGB means,” he wrote last month in a statement. But he said he received “an overwhelming amount of hate” on social media as #LGB turned into a political football he wasn’t prepared to handle. “Obviously, it got legs of its own and people started putting words in my mouth.”īrown granted few interviews. “My goal was to stay silent and hope that it went away,” he said. His euphoria in the aftermath dimmed as the slogan shot from meme to mainstream fodder. “There’s some reputability to that.”īrown had been relatively unknown while racing since 2014 in NASCAR’s two developmental series and had never won until Talladega. “But at the same time, my name’s out there. ![]() The souvenir shops that line Daytona’s streets sell Brandon-inspired T-shirts - none of them, of course, approved by NASCAR. Trump’s website offers ornaments, buttons and pint glasses - $29.95 for a set of two - with “Let’s go Brandon” stamped on each piece of kitschy merchandise. Politicians shouted the phrase from the House floor and repeated the soundbite in campaign ads. What should have been laughed off as a blown-over blooper somehow escalated into the fast-evolving pop-culture lexicon. It was not clear if NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast, who was wearing a headset, could hear what the crowd was saying during the interview, and she incorrectly told Brown the fans were cheering “Let’s go, Brandon.” The 28-year-old Brown unwittingly became entangled in this debacle when he won his first career NASCAR race in October in Alabama, and the Talladega Superspeedway crowd chanted “F- Joe Biden” during Brown’s interview. “There’s a lot of things that make me look like the enemy,” he told The Associated Press before his season opened Saturday with NASCAR’s second-tier Xfinity Series race at Daytona.
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