Factory-backed

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Factory-backed is a term commonly used in motorsports to describe a racing team, car, motorcycle or driver that competes with official sanction and financial support, or "backing" from a manufacturer. As motorsports competition is an expensive endeavor, some degree of factory support is desired and often necessary for success. The lowest form of factory backing comes in the form of contingency awards, based upon performance, which help to defray the cost of competing. Full factory backing can be often seen in the highest forms of international competition, with major motorsports operations often receiving tens of millions of dollars to represent a particular manufacturer.

One make series can also be backed by the factory, notably Ferrari Challenge and Porsche Supercup purely to allow themselves sell their competition specials of their models to customers and to organise series. These series commonly offer prize money and even sometimes a factory drive to an upper lever series.

In drifting, where factory backed teams are far and few (Mopar and Pontiac of Formula D for example), works team/drivers are teams and drivers who is backed by a tuning companies such as RE Amemiya, HKS or GReddy as opposed to those entered by the drivers themselves or a smaller and less well off tuning companies. The advantage to this is drivers can get access to expensive prototype parts provided by the company that are not yet available to customers and in the event of their car being too badly damaged to compete, a back-up car will be available to them.

In MotoGP, factory teams are given the most up-to-date motorcycles and parts, while satellite teams may use the previous season's motorcycle and are given equipment updates only after the factory team has had them.