Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Racing Writers Podcast.

I'm your host, Kelly crandall.

Our guest today is Elin Warner, the creator of Drag Race Bracket Bonanza.

This is an absolutely amazing, so much fun can fuel your competitive fire if you're like me game for n h A drag racing.

Drag Race Bracket Bananza is exactly how it sounds.

It's a bracket style game because drag racing is all about brackets.

Follow the ladder on race day, who's going to advance, who's making their way through the ladder.

So with drag Race Bracket Bananza, you sign up, you can play for free, and what you do every Sunday morning or Saturday night whenever you fill out your bracket is pick each winner through the bracket.

So you get to the finals, you picked your winner, and so on and so on down the line.

Elan is the creator of this game, as I said, and I love it so much and I want to get other people involved in it because I think it's been so fantastic for the sport of drag racing that our conversation today is quite simply just digging into how this game came about in all of the behind the scenes and nerdy aspects of making it work.

So we have so much to learn from today.

Hopefully it's going to make you interested to sign up if you're not already playing.

So let's jump in and learn all about it.

Here is Elan Warner on the Racing Writers Podcast.

All right, so we're going to bring Ellen into the conversation.

And you know, first off top of my head, very important question.

When you look at your name and you look at how it's spelled, how many people want to call you like Elon Musk now okay?

And I will tell you it is so funny.

If you remember the old Sports Center commercials that were like in the nineties, there's a guy named Michael Jordan, and it was like him doing all these things and like the level of disappointment, like the flower delivery guy or the Matre d restaurants when they saw Michael Jordan was coming in and it was like this regular business guy.

I now get that in certain circumstances, they're like, oh, you're not the Elon I was looking for, And I'm like, well, first of all, it's Elon, not Elon, And second of all, I'm very sorry you're disappointed that I'm not a bond villain, all right.

Well, like I said, I just need to clear the air on that because internally and in my head sometimes it makes me laugh because I do the same thing when I'm thinking about, oh, I need to send them an email or send them a text, and I re so often I'll catch myself and I'll do it because it's just it's funny how it's pronounced differently than it spells yes, and how it's looked.

And now, of course we all associate that with the other guy.

So it's out there and it's funny that when I was in high school, there's Elon College in high Point, North Carolina, and they used to be the Fighting Christians, like that was their mascot, so I could get shirts that said Elon Fighting Christians, so it looked like Elon Fighting Christians, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Well then they changed to the Phoenix, and it's not nearly as cool, but that was kind of like seeing you know, Elin pop up as like a sporting event or in headlines.

But now it's really wild because it's like everywhere my name is very it's just very funny.

So I am that other guy.

Yeah, and I was here first.

He's younger than me, and I've thought about just for funsies, just you know, throwing out on Twitter or X or whatever, like, hey, I was here first, But then I'm afraid I'll get like banned from Twitter because he owns Twitter.

That would be just like see.

You know, yeah, don't play with fire, right.

So that's a good little pr one to one is you have to before you go to social media think about how it's going to be received, and then I usually just hit the leap.

That's a whole sepherate conversation, my man, that's a whole podcast.

We actually touched on that.

So we've go back to a previous podcast and that's been covered.

Yes, go to uh gosh, well it's been so long ago now.

I'll think of it later, of course, after after we do this.

But yes, we did do a podcast talking about I think it was John Forrest's accent and PR and media.

Afterwards, crisis management, all that stuff.

That's right, So you were here first, though you're also doing far more important work in my opinion, because we need to talk about drag race.

Bracket bonanza, of course, my favorite thing, and I tweeted a couple weeks ago, I think before the season started, and I truly believe it.

I have been just blown away Elan of how far this has come in a short amount of time, because you kind of brought me in as you were starting it out, kind of beta testing it so to see what it is today.

That's why I want to have this conversation because it is so much fun.

It is truly kind of sweeping the industry, it feels like, which I want to get into that as well, but I want to dig first into the backstory of just going ahead and doing it, because I know you've discussed how this is not a new idea in the drag racing world.

Somebody just had to do it, So what was finally the kick in the pants to take that step and do it.

We launched it in tru twenty twenty three, so a US national twenty twenty three is when it went public.

I would say I've been having conversations with people about it since at least twenty twenty with guys that like Red Moon Marketing with Brian Loans, and I spent two hours talking about it one night.

I talked to some NHA people I've talked to drivers about it and it was just like, yeah, we should do that, or somebody did something kind of like that, and I don't know what.

Over the off season before twenty twenty three started, I was just like, I got to quit talking about it and I have to figure out how to do it.

And the real impetus for it was Aidan Lampkin, who is the it brains behind it.

Is a graduate of Colorado School of the Mines and he is a computer genius.

His real job he works for a credit card company, like in their fraud department.

I mean, so he's like legit brainiac.

And we have a family contest circle where we do March Madness together with the two families we do in NFL.

If you win March Madness, you get to pick a random contest that we all have to do between to bridge the gap.

Highly competitive.

There's a traveling Trophy.

We can get into that later.

But he actually built a bracket for like the Strongest Man contest that we did, and so he kind of and I was like, he kind of inadvertently showed me how to we could make a bracket that could potentially be functional for drag race Brack Bonanza.

So I hired him in the beginning of twenty twenty three and said, can you make this idea a reality?

And we started internally.

He made it, We got the website, all the back end stuff, and then we started testing it.

And you were really one of the early people outside of a circle of about that got to participate.

And you know, we just started.

You know, it was very what it started at versus what it is today.

Like anything, it's light years difference.

You know.

We just wanted it to work, and we spend a lot of time trying to break it, like you know, user interface, you know all that stuff.

So that's it was just finally, I just I'm a guy that I'll think about something.

My brain is just a big mush pod of ideas, and I don't get them out and do them or write them down.

I can't sleep a bit when you.

Talk about getting it to work.

First off, it's very simple in simple terms for users and for players, it's very much if you follow drag racing right, you pick the winner of each matchup and move on so forth down the line.

But behind the scene, this is where my nerve comes out.

How does it work?

How does the scoring work, who's keeping track of it?

Because you guys are very quick also and updating it almost in real time.

So give me the nerdy behind the scenes of.

How does this mak You're okay, put your nerd seatbelt on, because one of the unintended consequences of this is we are now a massive data resource because we wanted to make it user friendly for fans, so you need and for people also for people that aren't fans.

So if you tell your buddy I want you to play, they need to kind of have some context pictures, some stats.

Not overwhelming, but just like why would I pick John Force overrun caps?

Well, you know, is Angie Smith really that much better than Gaye Herrera.

So we started in twenty twenty three moving forward with putting every you know, all the qualifiers in with their ATM mile prowor so that data all gets stored by race by qualifying and then we go into race day and then on a race day on the back end we put in manually we type in a lapse time mild prower reaction time, and then what happened if Red lit cross the center line their car wouldn't start, And then we note the winner of the race.

That stuff all gets cashaped, so mean we go round by around.

So you're storing all this historical data.

So as we're going forward in twenty twenty three, we are gathering all that data and storing it.

But at the same time, I was going backwards and adding the data for the previous races for twenty twenty three, so you could look at someone's record before the US National started.

And then we're like, well, go back to twenty twenty three, let's go back to twenty twenty two.

Let's go back to twenty twenty one.

So we have the run data going back almost fifteen years, and then we can compile that and show it.

That's how you have all the route like on the truck, their cards, on their statu sheet has all that data.

The cool thing is we can and this is where our kind of alignment with nhr plaan HRA comes into effect.

Is that when you're filling out your bracket, you're essentially publicly saying this is my confidence level in this person.

We can see in a real time arc how the confidence is going from like Saturday when the brackets open, until Sunday morning.

So as soon as we lock the brackets.

On Sunday morning, we run a report and I don't know if you've seen the pigraphs we do that show who the fans think will win.

So we have that data in real time, which we're now figuring out how to utilize that data for plane hrra that if you're a person and living in a place that's legal to gamble, you know on that deal.

I would like to know if thousands of people are filling out their brackets and then fifty five percent of them think Ron Caps is going to beat paul Lee, even though Pauline might be the number seven qualifyer and Caps as the number ten qualifier, why do they what?

Do they know something?

Do they not know something?

So on the data side, we're creating and we're on the back end, So I spend ninety percent of my time making drag Race back of Bonanza is so cool for the user, for the player, for fun for kids.

But then there's ten percent where I'm trying to really figure out what do I have?

How could it also be utilized in this information world playing hr just fan nerd stuff like we can now we've partnered with drag Race Reference on the stats for the back end, so we'll be able to add in head to head matchups, so you'll be able to see Ron Capps's record versus Buddyhole or you know, Antron versus Steve before you make your picks.

Also not as a career number, as a race number, you know.

So it's it is so cool.

And the way it works is I literally am at a computer at the race and I'm watching the race, and I just sit there and type in round by round and then as soon as the round is over, I hit submit and it gets uploaded to the site and it's added so realistically, and we could submit race by race like but that just you know, it's just easier to just do it them all together, manually double check them and then upload them so that after E one of Top Fuel you see the results and usually it's about a five minutes, so we try to keep it going.

N h R A or drag racing in general, is a wonky sport.

We get it affected by a lot of outside issues.

We're relying on the n h R eight.

You provide us the qualifying order, race results, things like that, and sometimes, like anybody, they make mistakes and the first year twenty twenty three in Vegas, Bob Task and Bob Height qualified one to two.

Taska one Height two qualifying order goes out.

We put it on our site.

People start filling out brackets, and then thirty minutes later in Ha' is like, oh, Taska had a problem.

He's actually the number two qualifier.

So I'm at a restaurant in Vegas on the phone of my IT guy in Colorado.

Okay, we closed the brackets.

Four hundred people had filled out brackets already, so we closed the brackets and then went to work on changing it.

And then how do we handle those four hundred people getting their brackets correct?

And we were able to most of them.

It really didn't affect it too bad.

But then we reached out to the one hundred or so and we're like, hey, this happened.

We're going to open the brackets up and you need to go in and change your bracket.

And we kind of worked their way through it.

And that's probably the thing I'm most proud of is the team that I have working.

Abby's on my team, Aiden Peyton's our graphic design person.

Is how responsive we are on social media that if you are emails, you email us a technical question, like I've walked players through filling out a bracket this year on the phone, like they just say, I'm having a problem.

Log again, I'm having this, and we it's like, we understand you're immediately trying to do it and it's important to you and we want to make sure you can play.

So we handle every case and it gets less and less.

User faces getting better, people are getting more accustomed to it.

But I don't know how much longer we'll be to do that because we've now at the end of the first year, we had just over fifteen hundred people sign up to play in seven races.

At the end of last year we were almost to four thousand, and we're now over four thousand signed up players and that they are not all playing every weekend.

We learned a lot about going for twenty races last year.

It's a little bit more like fantasy football versus March madness.

You can get twenty five million people to fill out of bracket one time.

Getting people to fell out twenty of them is closer to fantasy football.

But we have three We have three hundred and fifty leagues in Braca Bonanza.

Whether there are four people leagues or are up to one hundred and twenty people, you know, So that mindset of getting people to play, making it easy for him is a huge, huge part of what we're trying to do and to make it fun and get people engaged in the sport.

Yeah, all right, there's a couple of things in there that you started to hit on that I want to ask specifically about.

But first off, the graphics you mentioned specifically with social media have been tremendous because you were talking about really, you guys, have become not just a game, but kind of information overload maybe for people who want it right.

So there's grafts and pie charts and stats and all of that.

But on the flip side of that, what were some of the important aspects of building this elan that you wanted to incorporate for the more casual, not die hard race fan.

The number one thing was photos.

I got my ass kicked a couple of years ago in the NFL playoff game that ESPN did when you could like pick like which quarterback was going to throw for the most touchdowns in a game or what running back was going to run for the most yards by a high school sophomore, Peyton who's actually my graphics person now literally picked and that was when the Bengals were going on their tear picked Joe Burrow because he had good hair and agree smile.

She didn't know anything.

She's picking running backs because she thought there the way they wore their U uniform, they look good in their uniform and how it matched their I mean it was like the most insane, but so she I had to have pictures.

You had to have something where if someone wanted to pick I want to pick all women racers.

I want to pick African you know, I'm an African American guy.

I want to you know, I want to support you know, Antron or you know, Richard Gadson spand you know, I wanted to make that a touch point.

And then the data about where they're from and do they drive like a Chevy or a Toyota or a fork because they're passionate about supporting their brands.

So those were the real touch points and just enough stance so you could just kind of know who was had had success and then who was a long shot because some people just like to do, you know, take the underdog.

So those were the biggest touch points where photos and you know making it where they always I was a manic about on the bracket when it's public, when it's published, that there's no ghost heads, that we have a photo for everybody you qualify for an A nature a race, you're gonna have your photo there, whether it's your first race or your five hundred race.

And I go around to the pits on for like we now scan the entry list, make sure everyone has their photo.

We have a driver database and like Steve Christman race this weekend in Arizona, so I went to Chris's pitt, introduced myself, explain what barka Bonanza was, and it's like, can I get your head shot?

So I have your headshot in there.

I did the same thing for John Capps and Funny Car, and it's it's a slipper dew because it also gives me a chance to talk to racers, which I love to do.

But in Funny Car there were twenty guys and caps.

When I went and talked to him, he wasn't qualified yet, but I was like, hey, I'm going to take your picture so that when you qualify, you'll be in the bracket with a head shot, you know.

So that's that's the biggest is I think the photos make a big difference and just having a little bit of date about where they're from.

Yeah, I completely agree with that.

I think you know.

As a side note over here in NASCAR, one of the reasons that I've tweeted that I like what the CW is doing with their coverage as they've come in this year with the Xfinity series is their graphics include what the driver's car looks like and what the driver's headshot is.

Because again to your point, the fans need to know who they're rooting for.

So if they see them in the garage or you know, at the grocery store or whatever, they know who those people are.

Yes, you need to recognize them.

You also touched on because I was going to ask how many people are playing now here we are in it so, because to reiterate, it started the final couple white races in twenty twenty three.

Twenty twenty four was the first full year.

Here we are now in twenty twenty five.

So you said over four thousand.

You were touching on their retention rate, and I wanted to ask about that too, because it is something you made a good comparison with, like fantasy football.

There's going to be people who like me, are very competitive and die hard, and I'm gonna set that thing every week.

But I'm curious about what the trends you all have seen of how many people are doing that, who comes in maybe plays it one week every couple weeks, or what are the trends there we are.

That's our goal for twenty twenty five is to figure out you know, the biggest thing was when you first started the first seven races of twenty twenty three was reminding people how to play, to just play.

It was new, and you get busy on Saturday night after race or Sunday morning, you forget about it.

We have time zone issues.

One of the races the first year was Ready that had a nine to thirty East Coast start, and at that point, basically forty five percent of our players are from West of the Rockies, so a nine thirty start was a six thirty lock time.

Like basically if you didn't have your brackets filled out by six thirty in the morning and fill them out, and a lot of people woke up and try to fill out their brackets and they were locked because the race had already started.

So we have to factor that in, so our arc is just reminding people at the Gator Nationals this year, we did a lot of hey, the race is starting at ten thirty in the morning.

If you're on the West Coast, fill out your bracket on Saturday night.

It's a lot of communication.

We now can do text updates to just remind folks.

If you opt in, you get a text reminder of hey, brackets are closing in two hours.

We try not to bomb people with that stuff because they got a lot going on and it's Sunday and they could be church or Saturday night.

When we're trying to communicate with people.

We're now reaching out, setting up some functionality of hey, you haven't played in three races, you know, want to just remind you, Hey, you know, this is how you can be notified, and trying to get some survey feedback on why they're not Is it just simply they're not having fun, or they have different interests, or they were only at a race in Gainesville and we found this out that a lot of people will sign up at the race.

We do a lot of on site gorilla marketing, Like I literally went abby came up with a good idea.

We used to.

I have little handouts with QR codes and little stickers we give out, and I would when people are in line for autographs, ad mission, foods or skag or wherever, I would walk the line and just chat them up about drag Exprack Bananasa and hey, this is game is out there if you want to play for free, here's a cure code.

While you're waiting in line, and then we do that.

We do when they're doing the track walk for NHRA.

You got a whole massive people.

When they're coming back from the track walk, I would give them the information.

I didn't want to give it out when they started, because last thing I wanted is a bunch of drag Exprack and Bananaza flyers on the track and then I get yelled at by the track crew guys.

So I waited until they came back and that we saw some tracks on that a Gator Nationals.

Abby just was like, I'm just gonna go up in the grand stands on Sunday morning.

These people are just sitting in the stands at nine o'clock waiting for an eleven o'clock start or whatever with their phones out, and so we did that and she was really successful.

Now, she did get some fan feedback about just general Nhara stuff because people thought she worked for the nh Ura and she was like, I'm not really that person.

But there were people beside her that saw her getting not really ramed, but like getting some pointed criticism that were like basically took pity on and we're like, hey, I really feel bad for give me that flyer because I'll sign up right now.

And so I went through the grand stands in Arizona this weekend for like forty five minutes and basically just walk the grand stands, chatting people up if they're out on their phone.

I was like, hey, here's this game.

It's free.

Anyone any age can play.

You just scan the QR code or go to drag raspractupananza dot com.

And we had almost one hundred people sign up before or the race.

What we found is you have to remind them that they can play every week.

A lot of people just thought it was events specific, so they were educating them on just because you signed up at Seattle doesn't mean you have to wait until Seattle to play again.

You can play every weekend.

But some our fans sometimes think of and this is where it gets into the bigger universe of NHA of someone comes to the Winternationals because it's local and they've always gone to the Winternationals, but they don't really watch it on TV or they don't really follow it because it's like a singular event in their life.

I go to the Winternationals.

That's what my family does, and I really love it, and caps is great and Antroine's great, but then they don't really truly follow it like on.

So now we're working on how do we get them to understand Yeah, in person, you see it and it's truly awesome.

Here's how you stay in contact with it for the rest of the year.

So we trying to do short contests.

The four Wide Cup is coming up, which is a contest for just if you get the most points for the two four wide races, we do a trophy.

Even though there's going to be three four wide races this year, we're still keeping the two Wide Cup as a standalone, the two race four Wide Cup as a standalone, and then the Charlotte two will be in the countdown.

The text messages you mentioned.

Social media has has grown exponentially.

I think you also do.

There's some email pushes, right, There's some newsletters or stats that go out there.

There's also been sponsors that have been brought on board, which goes back to my original point of just how much this has grown from the outside looking in from the inside though, Elan is has this grown the way that it needs to or you hoped that it would find I mean, con considering again, you only started a year, not even a year and a half, I wouldn't say ago, yeah, yes, and no it.

I tell my wife this is an investment.

This is completely being funded by Werner Games Entertainment, which is a separate company from my PR company.

And I tell people an interta that They're like, what's going on with braacka Bananza?

And I was like, I'll tell you I could have a kick ass super cop car and a totor home for what I'm currently investing in drag Race Brack of Bananza.

And people in the know know that that is that's a close to a six figure investment, and it is truly a passion project for me.

I'm you know, I don't want to say I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel, but we've been super Summit jumped on board very early.

Jim Greenleaf was a player, saw the opportunity started giving us some gift certificates which we gave to winners.

They saw a great response from that, and then they are the sponsor for the plaques this year.

So I'm big on and we can get in is prizes.

I think we give what some of the most awesome prizes for a free game out there any sport.

I challenge any other sport to say, hey, this is what you get for a free game.

Peak stepped up and this year they're sponsoring our Monday Peak Peak position recap.

And that was something that actually came from a conversation with the player that played for the first time, and they got the Friday Denz Deats tip sheet, they got the Saturday hey the brackets are open reminder or email, they got the Sunday Morning quick reminder email, and they played.

But then they got to like Tuesday, and like, I wonder how I did.

I don't really remember, you know, I wasn't really It's busy working and I'm going on the next risk and they're like, if you had a Monday email that just kind of put a bow on everything it would kind of close the loop.

So we did that and that that probably the last six races of last season, and that became our second most open email.

Obviously, the Saturday night brackets are open Email was the number one.

It's got about a sixty five percent open rate.

The Monday one is close to fifty percent, and it kind of spikes and stuff.

So Peak totally grabbed onto that with their all their peak performance and they're doing a sign to win contests and they're also very socially active, so that's been huge.

They have their own league for their Peak Squad and that's taken off.

We started a track challenge to again just get more tracks involved and rhode X Coffee stepped up to kind of take that on.

So we still are finding sponsors for individual races.

Bernie sponsored the Gator Nationals because they just wanted to own everything related to the Gator Nationals.

We've had, you know, Laris Mercer's I did a deal with Matt Hagen last year with Take Cattle Company, and that was that was more of a trade deal because Hagen's been so great supporting Brack of Binanza and retweeting and doing all my crazy requests for stuff, and I wanted to help his cattle company, so we gave away.

They actually had a product category that was like the Junior Bonanza, which was like one hundred pounds of ground b or something, so we they gave us some of that and then we promoted it as a prize for the event winners.

So that that has been super satisfying also, and the sponsor involvement and they're seeing the benefit of it, which is really cool, and that that I'm hopeful that that will grow as we move forward and can show our players are reactive, they are supporting our sponsors, they're knowledgeable in h RA fans, and you know, as we get more of them than it kind of becomes, you know, more impactful marketing.

I wanted to go next to the prizes that you were talking about because it seems like there's always new ones coming out.

So this is a part of the conversation whereas we keep talking about this and hopefully we're getting people interested as they listen, it's like, Okay, well what do I get out of playing?

Right?

That's always the big thing.

So you said there's plaques, those are race Pacific.

There's there's been belts that have been introduced.

There's a helmet that was introduced.

I think, as you said, there's more coming up.

So let's dig into all right, we've got people to sign up, Well, what are they going to get?

Yeah, so the number one thing we do is the plaques, and that you're talking about, did I expect it to get to this point?

Every race there's an overall winner based on who gets the most points, and then there's a top field winner who gets the most points just in top fuel, funny car, pro stock and prostoc motorcycle.

For a traditional race.

There's five plaques for every national event that we have a little corner of the pressure room set up and the dry divers will come in, they'll do all their post race stuff and then they we get them to sign the plaques.

The thing that's amazing now is it has become for the drivers part of the post race experience.

They know, they do the stage stuff on the track, they do Winter Circle, they come in the pressure to talk to the media and now they signed the driver's back bonanza plax like that's part of and Abby was in there at the Gator Nationals when Dallas Glenn was doing his media stuff with the backdrop and talking to all the media, and Gabe Herrera came in and saw Dallas was still going and then immediately she goes.

I could tell he was looking around to see where the brack of Bonanza plax were, Like he knew that was part of the process and we get them.

This past weekend for Arizona Nationals was probably one of our better plaque weekends because I try to get the drivers to personalize them beyond just signing them.

So Sean Langdon signed the top fuel play back to back Sean Laney because he'd won two years in a row.

Paulie won his first funny Car race, so he signed it.

First funny Car race, Paulie first funny car went Paulie.

And then Greg Anderson had this crazy deal where his car stalled and really you know, and this whole crazy deal, so I had him sign the plaque.

My craziest win ever, Greg Anderson.

You know, when Doug Coletta won his fiftieth race, he signed it.

Fiftieth win.

When Gage Herrera was on the tear of all the races, he literally was chronicling them on plaques.

Ninth in a row, tenth in a row, eleventh in a row, and I think I don't remember if I got Chase van Zant.

It was Chase fan Zant's first pro pro like bike win ever, and I was really kind of pushing him to like write like Gaye Terrera Street Killer kind of deal.

Yeah, broke the streak.

Broke the streak.

So the plaques are the most race to race universal thing.

Then we do get drivers to sign brack oft Bananza hats, and we do social media promotions with those.

You know, if you share stuff, you know, we have decals we send out, well, we'll do surveys and we do random things like that.

We actually have certificates for some races.

When we did the Legends deal with the US Nationals, we had Larry Dixon do a bracket, Warren Johnson, Ace McCullough and Angel if your bracket was better than theirs, we selected ten people randomly and they got like certificates of achievement.

They're like, hey, congratulations, you picked a bracket better than this legend.

And then to get people to play more on a shorter commitment, like we have the two race series for the four White Cup, we do trophies for that.

We do the Majors, which I have in contention that we should have four majors, but the three we have right now are the Gator Nationals, the Winter Nationals, and the US Nationals.

So Katie Buttera, who's Apple Art Girls as an artist out of Indy, does really amazing.

Souff made a major's trophy for US last year that had like three flags on it and they had Winternationals highlights graphically in US now it is really super cool, like so cool that I was like, dang and I should have had her just make one extra just for me, which she liked them so much, she made one for herself and I was like, dang it, I should have said, just charge me for another one.

So we do that for the majors, and then we do championship belts for the countdown so you can play.

If you come in the middle of the season, you may not have a chance to win the overall, but there's still opportunities to win stuff.

You know.

We did champ belts last year that we got the World champions to sign at Pomona.

And then the big thing is the helmet.

Impact gave us a helmet last year and we had every drive ever that made the countdown signed the helmet, and then we had the World champs signed the visor and that was the overall winner.

The guy that had played all season got that.

And again, this is a game that's free that anyone can play, and we've mailed prizes.

We can get into this too about where people are playing, but that's the whole price.

My deal is, I want to have the coolest prizes.

I want to get people something that would not necessarily get you don't have to be present to when we mail them to you, you know, So that's just a huge deal for me.

I want people to be like, I'm playing this for free, and if I'm not successful this weekend, I'm going to try again next week because man, I want to get a really cool plaque that's personal and it's signed and all that stuff, and just as a.

Sign not too.

There's also merch.

I recently discovered that people can go buy hats or shirts or whatever.

It may be.

All right, so you said it there.

That is an interesting thing when you're talking about kind of the data and getting people involved.

And we were talking about earlier about retention rate and having people sign up, So dig into that a little more of where you can see where people are playing from.

Because the cool thing about drag racing is I mean, listen, there's motorsports all over the world, but drag racing.

Yes, NHRA is well known in the United States, but there's also what the FIA, Yeah, Australia.

It's not like this is an unknown commodity.

So are you seeing it to where people all over the world are signing up?

Yes, and we have racers that are representing other countries.

Ida z Edderstrom, the Quadras, you know, so we have We've had We've shipped plaques for winners all to forty three states.

We've shipped them to six different countries.

We consistently sent prizes to Canada, you know, so we sent prizes to Canada, have sent prizes to the UK, have sent prizes to Germany, have sent prizes to Australia.

We had a winner in the Philippines that thank goodness.

I sent him an email and he's like, I live in the Philippines, but I'm coming back to the US for a trip to see my brother in about a month.

He lives in Las Vegas.

Just mail my plack to Las Vegas.

So it was a difference in fifteen dollars in shipping versus seventy five dollars in shipping.

But but, and I don't mean interrupt you, but the hook here for people is that so many times with games or gambling or whatever meat, whatever it may be, you know, the fine print is, oh, you have to be a legal resident or oh it's not open to this country or this state.

You guys are open to everybody.

Yeah, because our prizes are less than five hundred dollars, there's no quid pro quo.

It's you know, we're not offering you know, it's basically you're just kind of coming to the site for free playing, and then you know you're opting into emails standard stuff.

But we're hyper sensitive to not sharing that data, you know, bombing people tons of emails.

But yeah, we have and we can see like get super nerd.

We use AWS on our back end, which is Amazon works just whatever.

But you can watch like there's a map of the world and when we open the brackets, you can see little dots literally filling out brackets and you can just watch it go across time zones on the country and we can just see people other people playing here.

You know, and so that's one of the graphics we're going to show is here's where people have played so far in twenty twenty five, and it is truly people are playing around the world, and that to me is also as the guy that got this started, makes my head just right.

That just the fact that it's a thing and that people are playing and that people you know, have Now I've always been a behind the scenes guy on the pr side.

My job is to promote other people.

But now I have this thing where I'm the public face of So when people will come up to me at a race and engage me in conversation about Break of Bananza or refer to me as the Break of Bananza guy, or to my daughter's mortification on an autograph or a picture with me, it's like, it's really cool, but it's also kind of surreal.

But that people are I mean, I've had a mom come up to me in reading last year it was like, I love Brack of Bonanza so much because I play with my son and that's like our connection, you know, and guys are playing with their dads and they're not in the same place, but Brack of Bonanza is kind of connecting them race to race, which is really cool.

I want to have you back on in the future elin to talk more about who you are and what you do, because I love the communication side, and I'm sure you have stories for days of people that you've worked with, and I love digging into, just again the media side and how you know folks like you try to elevate drivers and so on and so forth.

But I want to save that for a future show.

So a couple more things before we wrap up here is as this has gone on now the last couple of years, the drivers are in on it.

As you said, it gets mentioned on broadcasts, it's talked, it's widely talked about when you're at the racetrack.

What was that work like to get people in the industry to buy into something like this?

It was for the four people that follow me on Instagram.

You'll you will get in my stories, which I'm terrible at.

I motivate myself with.

I got was lucky enough to meet Kobe Bryant many years ago and have the conversation about black bomba and how he pushed himself as a basketball player to get better, and that just stuck with me.

So if you following my story.

All you're getting is David Goggins, shocko.

All these guys their motivation of you know how you just have to run into a wall and get knocked down and get back up.

Because when I started, the NHA was very understandably wary of it.

They just didn't know what it was.

They were in the process of putting play in h RA together and I just came out gang busters like I was just like, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to just give out flyers and I'm going to put QR codes everywhere.

And it was just like a full on gorilla marketing.

I'm getting drivers to do stuff I'm trying.

I'm putting logos on race cars.

And the pushback was, you know, so I write PA announcements for some of my teams and I give them an announcer.

So of course there are teams are like, we'll support Dragger's back Bonanza.

So I'm writing, like, right, and Bonanza is part of one of their sponsors, and they're like, well, the logo is not really big enough on the car to warren a PA.

So that kind of opened can of works.

There were sponsors in the manufacturer's midway that were loving the game that were like, hey, we have stand ups in our pit area.

If you make a sign with the QR code, we'll put that in our pit area when we don't have autograph signs.

I was like, that's gretigo, but you probably need to clear that with NHAA because I work on a track operator side as well with a motorplex, so I knew there's some rules.

And so then sponsors were finding out that they didn't have passed through rights in their own display, and then that became a thing, and I'm trying to get it mentioned on the Fox broadcast and they're sensitive to gambling, and that became a thing.

So it was constantly me and there's so many great people in h A that were supportive that were just like, hey, we're just trying to we want this to be successful, but we've got to figure it out.

We can't get ahead of ourselves out of our ski So it was me constantly trying things, getting my hand slapped, and then going okay, how can we work around this?

And they were now it is much We have a much better relationship with Play Natura, but it's still trying to figure out how we mesh the two because drag race brack of Bananza is a gateway drug to play nature a All fantasy is, you know, all fantasy is a at some level a mechanism to get you to start taking a chance on winning money.

If you think you're really good at fantasy, Let's see if I can put my money where I'm about this and guys will have you know, and and that's fine.

If you have, you know, you have the means you're of age, it's legal in your state.

That's great.

But brack of Bonanza to me, is just a great marketing tool that is still being developed and figured out to how you know, how it can all work and maximize and promote the sport and promote the drivers and all that stuff.

But the driver's getting involved has been great in the Nature app.

It was so funny.

I did some marketing with the HR last year and we can have a continuing marketing relationship.

But I did an email blast and I paid to have a certain number of email sent and I got an email back or from one of the ntry marketing guys.

It's like, hey, we have a problem with the headline in your email.

And I'm like, okay, what is, He goes, well, it has to say NHA Marketing partner, and then your subject line is that okay.

And at this point, this was like twenty twenty three where I'd been like doing and I was like, yeah, you want to send an email out to like thousands of people that says I'm an NHRY marketing partner.

Hell yeah, do that.

So then they send it out and then I had a screenshot of that, and then I blasted that out to everybody that hey, re legit, we're an entry marketing partner now, and that you know, that became a thing, you know, because but so it's constantly push and getting knocked down and having things fail and just figuring out, how do we make it better?

This didn't work, how do we make it bit which, you know.

Like anything, it's just constantly pushing and showing people that it's you know, this is good for you, it's good for me, this is it's harmless.

And for those who don't know, just quick note the play NHA is the official gambling side of nhr A.

Now that is that has been introduced.

So that's why you know, people hear a lot about that too.

But drag race Breck at Bonanza.

There's no money involved, as you said, it's free to sign up, and you're just you're trying to win prizes.

So all right, one last thing, because again we're going to have a whole separate conversation in the future about more stuff.

But you made a comment earlier, Elan about how your mind is always going and kind of just how this came to be.

So I take that to mean that your mind is going to continue to go of what's next, what do we keep doing with it?

How do we make it bigger?

Right, I'm assuming that's the next part.

The next part is incorporating you know, to me, I'm a huge football fan, but you know, Fox does a good job of you know, on the on again on the fantasy wagering side where you can win Terry Bradshaw's one hundred thousand dollars I'm now looking at and we had great success with the Legends for the US Nationals.

Is how do we with our marketing partners, like with Peek, We're going to probably hopefully have like Alex Martin fill out of bracket.

She's there, Dragon Drive person, have her fill out of bracket and then you can pick against Alex Martin.

I would love to have Kletus McFarland do a bracket.

I would love to have David Freiberger do a bracket.

Freg Burger, if you're listening, I'm straight up slow rolling you on this.

I have not asked for anything, but like I was fortunate to do n HRA a TV with Loans and Freiburger.

Just they called me and they're like, hey, do you want to talk about brack of Bonanza while we're you know, in some downtime.

And it took all Kelly, you know me, it took all my energy.

I'm standing between Loans, who is one of my all time favorite people in the sport, and I have not had much interaction with David Freiberger, but he's so awesome on roadkill, on all the things he does that I just literally just wanted to grab him by the shoulders and say, will you just please tweet something about drag race brackup Bananza to your seven hundred thousand followers, Just if you would just possibly say we were cool, that would be so awesome.

But I did it.

I just totally played it cool.

It's like, Okay, this is great.

So those are the things where there's a you know, I read all of Malcolm Gladwell's stuff.

I'm like, what exactly is the tipping point for brack of Bonanza.

I think we're getting closer Summit and Peak and Rhodex Coffee coming on board is a little bit of it.

You know, that's a tipping point to see the sponsorship side of it, more players coming in, the driver supporting it, NHRAE becoming realizing oh this does benefit us both and I am you know, and I think a lot of people are like, how, you know, are you making money at this?

I am not.

I'm not making money.

My goal is to if I can get it to a break even level, braackup Binanza will go on forever.

And you know, it's creeping that way.

I'm seeing, you know, like progress and things are coming together, but it's still got a long long ways to go.

But it's fun.

I mean, I just love the challenge of it.

I love the satisfaction of people playing and not going what will I will always.

I've had some people approach me with you know, we have nine million tequila companies involved in NHRAE.

We've had some interest from Tequilla Company.

It's like, hey, how could we be involved, And I have said I don't really know, because I truly want to keep it fan friendly and for all ages, because we do have a lot of junior drags or drivers or kids playing, and if there's a tequila sponsor involved, I just don't know how that would resonate.

I want to just kind of keep it user friendly for everybody and not have any give anyone any pause to not want to play.

And people have talked about, oh, hey, you have all this data, you could start doing a tiered system where you, yes, you could play for free, but then you can maybe charge twenty five dollars to get at it.

And I was just like, I'm just still trying to figure this out, Like I can't have all these tiers and payments and follow you know that, son, Right now, it's much easier for me to make it free, take the financial hit, and figure out how to just make it fun, make it better, make the user interface cool.

And you know, I looked at how the NCAA did their brackets online now, so we were already talking that I think our interface now is great for twenty twenty five and possibly twenty twenty six, but by twenty twenty seven, we'll probably who knows how the interface and cell phones will be working, but will you know, have to do some kind of Oh, just keep it fresh.

Yeah, that's what it's all about, right.

It has to stay fresh, and it has to stay relevant, and it has to stay intriguing enough to get people to keep coming back, as we talked about.

So all right, Ellen, I appreciate this.

I wanted to dig into all the nerdy things of this, but I also wanted to bring awareness to this because you know how much I love it.

I think it's so much fun.

I think it's so cool again to have a way to keep people intrigued during a long season.

NASCAR is going to have their own in season tournament bracket thing this year, and Denny Hamlin created one for fans last year.

So I just love a way for people to be engaged in what they're watching.

So hopefully we brought some awareness to this today.

But I also just get to be nosy about what it's all about.

So I appreciate that.

No problem anytime, killying.

I definitely love to tell drag racing stories anytime you want to talk about, you know, the ins and outs.

I appreciate all the coverage you give, and so the easiest way, I mean, my last little plug is you can sign up for free anytime.

You just go to drag racepracupanansa dot com and sign up an ease, follow us on our social media.

We have Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook post all the time, and I just appreciate you kind of a being a player and helping out with debatea testing that I will tell you that will always be one of my favorite texts was when we were testing it in Brainerd and you sent me a text on Sunday morning that was like, Hey, I'm sitting here with Deb Williams and we're in I don't know Martinsville or wherever you were in summertime, and we're filling out our drag race brackup bananas and brackets, and I really thought, this is exactly what I want to be happening, is like people other places thinking about drag racing, and that like was my first glimmer of hope that I was onto something.

Was you like, Hey, I think this is really cool.

I've told Deb Williams about it, and now we're kind of doing it at a NASCAR race and it's gotten you know, and it's just continued to grow from there.

So thank you very much for being an early adopter on all this stuff.

Yeah no, I got deb involved.

I think I got Jerry jord involved.

So I'm competitive, but I'm also spreading the word, which comes to me sometimes because there's more people to beat me.

But that's all right, it's all it's all for the good of things.

So Elan, I appreciate it, and we will have you back again to talk more about just drag racing and your stories, because I know you got a ton of them, but I appreciate the time today.

Thank you, Kelly.

All right, well time for you.

Go sign up.

Hopefully you want to play if you're not already, or at least go check it out and see what it's all about.

Because it's so easy to get into, it's so easy to become addicted to.

Whether you just like games and fantasy or following racing, or you're a diehard drag racing fan, this game.

Is for you.

We talked about it.

I am highly competitive and I love this.

I am so excited to fill these brackets out, but I get so upset when I don't win, but I keep doing it every weekend every race, so hopefully you will now want to sign up, And of course I thank Elin for coming on the show, and I do promise.

I know I've said this quite a bit with guests, but we're going to have Alan back to talk just about his career on a public relations, media crisis, communication, all of that, to talk about drag racing, because he truly does have some great stories.

Drag race Bracket bonanza dot com.

I know it's a mouthful, but you can do it.

Drag race Bracket bonanza dot com.

You can also follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

So much information that they put out there.

If you do get into the game and you want to play, so go check them out, give it a follow, and hopefully you will sign up.

If you enjoy the conversation, please leave a rating and review.

Can go to social media.

My handle is at Kelly Crandall on Twitter or x if that's what you're calling it, Facebook, Instagram as well.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

I'm very easy to find and engage with Blue Sky as well.

Trying to be more active over there.

So let me know what you think, and thank you, of course for clicking and listening.

Each week and with that, that's all we have for this week, so I appreciate you, as I said, clicking, listening, downloading.

We'll be back soon with a brand new episode of the Racing Writers Podcast