Every sponsorship deck guide tells you what to add. That's how you end up with a 19-slide deck that nobody reads past slide five.
Nobody writes the other list. So here it is. These are the six slides I'd delete from almost every racer's deck I've seen, including the ones I built for LeadFoot Racing before I knew better.
Our #121. The deck that pitches this car is shorter now than it was three years ago, and it works better.
Deleting beats adding
There's no big public study on racing sponsorship decks. There is good data on investor pitch decks, which get read the same way — fast, on a phone, by someone with 40 other emails.
DocSend's tracking, summarized by PitchGrade, found the average deck people actually open is 19.2 slides, while decks in the 11-to-15 range earn the longest reading time per slide and convert to meetings at the highest rate. Investors spend about 3 minutes and 44 seconds on a first pass.
That's investor data, not sponsorship data, so hold it loosely. But the mechanism carries: attention is fixed. Every slide you add takes time away from the slides that sell.
Your deck isn't a folder. It's a budget. Spend it.
If you want the version we build from — the slides that stay, in order, with the language that goes on them — that's the deck module inside The Get-Funded System.
The six slides I'd delete
1. "My Racing Journey" (the four-paragraph life story)
You started karting at eight. You won a club title at 14. You've wanted this your whole life.
I believe you. So does everyone else pitching that brand.
A sponsor is not evaluating your passion. They're evaluating whether you can move their product. Your story matters, but it earns you about two sentences on the cover slide, not a full page with a timeline graphic.
Replace it with: one line under your name. "Spec Miata driver, NASA Rocky Mountain, second season." Then move on to something they can buy.
2. The season budget breakdown
This one feels responsible. It isn't.
The second a brand sees your tires, entry fees, and fuel costs stacked in a table, you've reframed the whole conversation. You're no longer a marketing channel. You're an expense somebody has to cover.
Marketing managers don't have a "help a racer" line item. They have a budget with a return attached to it.
Replace it with: what their money produces. Posts, appearances, content they can reuse, an activation day at the track. Same number at the bottom — completely different question in their head.
3. Gold, Silver, and Bronze
The Sponsorship Collective is blunt about why sponsors say no, and generic tiered packages are near the top of the list. Their point: standardized Gold/Silver/Bronze ladders are built out of logo placements, tier levels, and broad visibility claims — passive visibility that brands stopped buying.
The tell is that your tiers would work for a 5K fun run, a youth soccer club, or a food festival with a find-and-replace. If the package isn't built for this brand's actual problem, it reads like a form letter with prices on it.
Replace it with: two or three options built around what this brand told you they need. Same price points. Different framing.
4. The logo placement mock-up
Every deck has it. The rendering of the car with the sponsor's logo on the quarter panel, plus a bullet list of where else it goes.
Here's the problem. Logo placement is where sponsorship ends, not where it starts. Vague promises of "brand exposure" make it impossible for a sponsor to calculate ROI, which means your slide gives their boss nothing to approve.
Keep one small image of the car with their branding — it helps them picture it. Kill the bullet list.
Replace it with: reach, engagement, and one thing they can measure. A tracked code, a captured email list, an event where their people meet your people. I broke down which numbers matter most in the three numbers sponsors want before your lap times.
If a slide would survive a find-and-replace of the sponsor's name, it isn't selling. It's filler.
Not sure which of your slides are filler? That's literally the job of our $39 Pitch Teardown — you send the real deck or email, we mark it up in writing the way a sponsor would, and tell you what to cut before a brand does it for you.
5. "Why motorsports marketing works"
The slide with the F1 viewership numbers. The global motorsport audience stat. The chart about sponsorship industry growth.
None of it is yours. A brand looking at a grassroots Spec Miata program does not care what Formula 1 delivered for Oracle. Borrowed authority makes you look smaller, not bigger, because the gap between the stat and your program is the whole slide.
Replace it with: your own numbers. Smaller and real beats huge and irrelevant every time. Your following, your track attendance, your local reach, your engagement rate.
6. "Thank you for your consideration"
The last slide of most decks is a thank-you and an email address.
That's not a close. That's a shrug. The Sponsorship Collective also flags weak follow-through as a common killer — proposals get sent, then everyone waits politely for a decision nobody scheduled.
Replace it with: one specific next step, with a date. "I'd like to start with the mid-tier for the October weekend at Pueblo. Can I put a hold on it while you check with your team this week?"
A specific ask gets a specific answer. Even a no is worth more than silence.
What's left is the deck
Cut those six and most racers are down to seven or eight slides. Cover, who you are, who your audience is, what the brand gets, proof, packages, the ask.
That's not a thinner pitch. That's the pitch that was buried in there the whole time.
The full build — slide order, the exact language, the packages that don't read generic, and the outreach that gets you the meeting where the deck matters — is The Get-Funded System, $67. It's built by a team that's still out there chasing partners for a real race car, not by someone who read a book about it. And if you already have a deck and just want to know what's killing it, send it in for a Pitch Teardown instead.
Go open your deck. Delete something today.
Do you believe?
Sources: PitchGrade — How Long Should a Pitch Deck Be? (DocSend data), The Sponsorship Collective — Why Sponsors Say No, AnyRoad — Event Sponsorship Packages: Tiers, Pricing & ROI 2026. Deck-length and reading-time figures are investor-deck data from DocSend and are labeled as such, not sponsorship-specific research. No LFR customer, sales, or survey data is claimed anywhere in this post — the rest is our own experience building and sending these decks.
