anyone here using their race team as a business expense? im in the process of starting my own race team. i own my own business for the past 20 years, and figure i could write off my racing expenses as an advertising business expense. my uniform and car are both lettered with my company name. and my website will show information on our racing program. is there any one here with this type of experience. of course my accountant tells me to talk to a financial advisor, my private banker account managers tell me to talk to my tax man, and my financial advisor tells me to talk to my banker.

http://www.frrax.com/rrforum/index.php?sho...amp;hl=business

I discovered, for me at least, it was more of a hassle and too expensive to do it on my level.

I try and deal in cash as much as possible.

I've been doing this for some time as you describe here. It is legit as advertising and a good deduction.

thats what i was hoping. i read the other racing thread and it got more into an actual race team. making money, sponsorship. my team would strictly be for advertising in the local area. plus if im lucky enough to make it to the scca runoffs that would be a lot more exposure as im hoping to take my company national. 100% of my work comes from referrals and i spend about 10,000 a year on yellow pages. the only reason i spend on the yellow pages is so that my competition has to, so i figure if im going to spend that money and not get anything out of it, whats the difference in spending at the track where i would probably get more exposure.

Indeed, I have a section on my website for the racing and sell quite a few "Gekko Racing" t-shirts!

What kind of business are you in?

www.geckoranch.com (IMG:http://www.frrax.com/rrforum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Julie,
If you don't mind me asking, what expenses do you write off? All your race day expenses? The initial cost of the car? Travel mileage, etc.

My wife owns an engineering firm and I could definitely see this as a very nice deduction for simply putting the name of her business on a car I'm going to race anyway, etc.

PM me in a few days for details, I am going down south to LA to visit my CPA coincidentally!

Another pitfall is putting company logos on the side of trailers. The DOT has some interesting regulations about inter- and intra-state commerce.

I remember that experience you had Mitch! Makes me leery of doing that.