Brandon Brown was not an especially fearsome stock car driver, nor did he figure as the sort to crack open sport’s Pandora’s box entering last October’s Sparks 300 – a race in Nascar’s mid-tier Xfinity series. In most cases a mid-pack qualifying position would not bode well. But at Talladega Speedway, a crash-happy oval circuit where anything can happen, the best drivers are the ones who survive the carnage. And after two multi-car pile ups, Brown assumed a narrow lead with 13 laps to go. A final accident two laps later that took out seven cars sealed his first Xfinity series triumph in 114 tries.

With night falling on the Alabama circuit, the 28-year-old Virginia native emerged from his Chevrolet Camaro machine in a daze for the post-race TV interview. As he breathlessly thanked his sponsors and revisited his driving tactics, some in Talladega’s packed crowd began chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” loud and clear enough to come across Brown’s microphone. Desperate to keep the interview going with her producers unable to bleep the background noise, NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast tried to Jedi mind trick her viewers. “You can hear the chants from the crowd – Let’s go, Brandon,” she said.

Since then, Let’s Go Brandon has gone from awkward TV moment to harmless meme to conservative dog whistle on par with Maga hats and OK hand gestures – a way of insulting the president without triggering censorship. It adorns lawn signs and bumper stickers. One guy said it directly to Biden last Christmastime as the president and first lady were taking calls into Norad’s Santa tracker from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Another guy got kicked off a flight this week for having Let’s Go Brandon writ small on his facemask. As the slogan exacerbates the deepening political divide in the country, Brown has so far struggled in his attempts to ride the median.

Brown laughed off the Let’s Go Brandon cheers initially, then went silent when it morphed into something more sinister. Finally, in a December New York Times interview, he expressed a wish to distance himself from the now politically charged slogan, not wanting to cost his family-run team hundreds of thousands in potential sponsorship support. “If they’re going to use my name,” Brown, a Republican, said of his fellow conservatives, “I’d like for it to be productive.”

In a subsequent Newsweek op-ed titled My Name Is Brandon, he described himself as a driver “in the passenger seat of my own viral moment,” albeit a squarely middle-class one with a lot of thoughts about inflation affecting prices at the pump. (“I buy more gas than most,” he quipped.) Still, he was quick to assure readers that he wasn’t “going to tell anyone how to vote” or had any “interest in leading some political fight.”

But then just before the new year, Brown appeared to quickly abandon those ideals for a two-season, eight-figure sponsorship pact with LGBcoin.io, a cryptocurrency that’s literally short for Let’s Go Brandon. The announcement unveiling Brandon’s red, white and blue repainted car called him “truly America’s driver.” But as with most things crypto, the wealth infusion – a lifeline for a family-run racing operation that came close to closing its doors – disappeared as quickly as it arrived.

But instead of a cyber raider or a pyramid scheme it was Nascar president Steve Phelps who pumped the brakes on the deal out of a desire to unseat the sport from any politics on either side of the aisle, lest it turn off the new fans the sport urgently seeks. And then the invisible hand of the crypto market dealt the finishing blow. After achieving a peak liquidity pool value of $6.5m at the start of the year, the coin crashed and burned. It is now worth close to zero.

The lost funding puts Brown back in the position of having to cobble together sponsors, an effort that will be obvious in the varying paint schemes and decals that adorn his car this year – beginning with the Saturday race that undercards Sunday’s Daytona 500. And Brown, who starts from the back of the pack yet again, will have his work cut out for himself throughout the season in the hustle for patronage. The Original Larry’s Hard Lemonade, a sponsor on Brown’s Talladega-winning car, dropped him in response to the bitcoin deal. “All money is not good money,” company founder Vic Reynolds cautioned in a farewell statement.

Politically motivated sponsorship might seem toxic now, making it easier for Phelps to drop the hammer on Brown, but precedent suggests it’s only a matter of time before they have it both ways. Not only have drivers raced machines with Bush-Cheney and Trump-Pence livery in the recent past, but it wasn’t even two years ago that Bubba Wallace raced a Black Lives Matter car on the way to leading a campaign to banish displays of the confederate flag from the sport – although the organisation didn’t pay him for that exposure.

Sponsorship dollars are hard enough to chase down in this economy. If anything, Brown may have unwittingly stumbled upon an untapped market: political zealots. If his efforts to exploit them continue to get struck down, don’t be surprised if this becomes the movement that emerges in response to Wallace’s progressive push on the way to Nascar becoming the next front in the raging culture wars – and here at least those zealots have a point. With everyone from the former president to mom-and-pops cashing in on the Let’s Go Brandon craze, it seems the only one who isn’t making much money off of this is the guy who inspired the whole thing –and arguably deserves to profit most.

For now, though, Brown seems content not to push the issue while continuing the hustle for sponsorship. But, really, there’s no telling how soon he could find himself facing back inside a conference room with another would-be supporter with real money and right-wing ideology. At that point he’ll have to decide whether selling out is worth his soul and his sport’s, leaving the lid on Pandora’s box well in the dust.