NASCAR chooses IR

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.--Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, a division of Ingersoll-Rand Company, was chosen in March to be an official partner of NASCAR, providing security solutions, products and other services. "Stadiums is really something we've dominated in Europe," said Dave Sylvester, president of security technology for the Americas, "now having made this linkage with NASCAR we're really going to accelerate our abilities." Tim Christine, director of security at NASCAR for the past three years following 21 years in the Secret Service, said Ingersoll Rand would be doing more than helping secure the 1,500 races NASCAR hosts annually at more than 100 U.S. facilities. "We have 17 of the top 20 most attended events in the country each year," he said. The biggest challenge is controlling access to the garages and pits, where many fans are allowed access. "My vision is to use RFID technology as the solution to that," he said. "Ingersoll Rand ... will be developing the next generation of access controls." Further, IR and NASCAR together have produced a security manual to be distributed to more than 150 security directors in the motor sports industry and other major spectator sports organizations, and, at this year's Daytona 500, Ingersoll Rand developed a custom digital CCTV system that helped NASCAR regulate the number of tires each racing team was allowed. Financial details of the partnership were not released, but Christine confirmed it's a four-year partnership. "The benefit to IR is that they have the ability through our business-to-business relationships to do business directly with the tracks, which are independently owned," he said. "They now have the ability to establish relationships with our tracks as well as corporate sponsors." Sylvester confirmed this is in line with Ingersoll Rand's recent rebranding campaign (see story in the April issue of Security Systems News), intended to help market to the Fortune 500 companies, among others.