NASCAR team for sale: one owner; 2.1 million miles. That's what a classified ad might look like if NASCAR team owners get any more anxious to sell stakes to investors. In just the last 12 months 3 owners out of 15 with multicar teams, including iconic stock car maven Jack Roush, have sold big chunks, and a fourth deal is imminent. Before these there hadn't been a deal since 2003.

NASCAR is running into bumps after years of high-octane rises in revenues from television deals and sponsors. The sport will fetch $4.4 billion in a new eight-year contract with ABC, ESPN, Fox and TNT, 40 percent more than in its previous one. Sounds good, but the money is back-end-loaded; the annual payout won't exceed the 2006 payout until 2012. Spending by sponsors has also stalled. The cost to sponsor a car remains pegged at $15 million for an upper-tier car, with few exceptions. At the same time, owners are spending ever more on technology to keep up with rivals and to build safer cars under a NASCAR mandate that could cost them a combined $100 million over two seasons...

The sponsorship is a tougher sale now that TV ratings are drooping — down 9 percent so far this season and 11 percent for the sport's biggest race, the Daytona 500. According to market research firm Joyce Julius & Associates, several Nascar sponsors are getting dramatically less exposure value. Pricing that logo whizzing by on the side of a car at the amount that a 30-second TV commercial would fetch during the race, it calculates that Budweiser got $183 million in exposure value last season, off by 4% from three seasons ago.

This is, like Hollywood, a business of celebrity. Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s announcement in May that he was leaving the company his father founded set off a frenzy among team owners that ultimately landed him at powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports. Earnhardt’s primary sponsor, and ride, for the first of a 5-year deal with Hendrick beginning in ’08, hasn’t been decided yet. But at least one suitor has offered $28 million to splash their logos on his new car in place of current sponsor, Budweiser, owned by Anheuser-Busch. Trouble is, any short-term upside of the Earnhardt deal won’t spill over to other, lesser teams, say Ardy Arani, head of the Championship Group, an Atlanta marketing agency. The easy money in this business is over.