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CHARLOTTE – First Jack Daniels and now Jim Beam, more and more sponsors have announced they won't be sponsoring race teams in 2010. But as the economy continues to hit NASCAR in the wallet, one of the sport's legends says there's a way to keep the sponsorship money flowing.

"This is a time when we just need to be taking the knives out, doing some surgery and cutting costs and make it less expensive to race," said Humpy Wheeler, who was the first to sell naming rights to a racetrack when he was president of Lowe's Motor Speedway.

Wheeler says right now the price to sponsor racing teams is just too high for companies looking to cut costs. Each team will spend $15 million, $20 million or more a year and much of that cost gets passed on to sponsors.

But Wheeler says teams can charge less if they spend less on their cars.

"The person that's in the grandstand, what he wants to see is great racing and you can have great racing economically," he said.

Craig Depken, a sports economist at UNC Charlotte says until the economy improves, NASCAR could find itself with more sponsors pulling their names off the cars. If that happens, he says there could be an even bigger problem.

"That would be the, in my mind, one of the biggest risks that NASCAR faces, that they just cannot field enough teams to fully populate the slots that are available for a race," he said.

Still, Wheeler says he's confident NASCAR will find a way to cross this finish line with their bottom line in good position.

"We'll persevere," he said. "Americans have always been creative and have had a lot of ingenuity and I think we'll get through this."

NASCAR officials point out that while they've lost some sponsorships, they've also brought in at least five new sponsors this year.