Business Quote by David Leslie

You can hear the bitter economics of “success” grinding behind David Leslie’s matter-of-fact delivery. Nissan “won the championship,” the supposed endgame of any racing program, and the reward was withdrawal. That inversion is the point: in modern motorsport, victory isn’t a finish line, it’s a line item.

Leslie frames it as common sense - “because it was costing millions of pounds” - but the subtext is a quiet indictment of how sponsorship logic hollowed out national competition. If the expense is only justifiable when it buys international visibility, then a domestic championship becomes, in corporate terms, a poorly targeted ad buy. The phrase “ok, that might be ok” does a lot of work: it’s resignation masquerading as reasonableness, a veteran smoothing the rough edges of a reality he clearly finds absurd.

Context matters here. National touring car and similar series once sold themselves as accessible, locally rooted spectacle: manufacturers proving reliability and grit in front of home crowds. Leslie’s anecdote exposes the shift from sport-as-community to sport-as-marketing platform. Nissan doesn’t leave because the racing failed; it leaves because the return on attention didn’t scale.

There’s also a personal sting embedded in “the one I was driving for.” Drivers are employed identities, tied to brands that can vanish overnight. Leslie isn’t just describing a budget decision; he’s describing how precarious the whole ecosystem is when ambition depends on corporate patience, and corporate patience depends on global reach.