A person drives a car; a person drives a golf ball. BMW makes cars and motorcycles. BMW has for the first time undertaken the sponsorship of a major professional golf event in the United States.

Now you have all the elements that happy happenstance — and a marketing department thinking overtime — has collected in the photograph below, taken following a competition in which the driver of the golf ball beat both the motorcyclist and the driver of the car.

The matchup was called “The Power of Driving vs Driving Power” and was staged at the Autobahn Country Club, a motorsports park in Joliet, Ill. That’s located a moderate drive — excuse the thematic repetition — from Cog Hill Golf and Country Club, in turn a long putt from Chicago. Cog Hill was the site of the BMW Golf Championship.

The golfer in the photograph is Stewart Cink, a four-time PGA Tour winner. The biker is Nate Kern, a reserve rider for the BMW factory team, and the BMW M5 was driven by Graham Rahal, 18-year-old son of Indy champion Bobby Rahal, now making his own name in Champ Car racing.

The competition more or less replicated a similar event held last year in Munich, BMW’s hometown. How it works: driver, driver and biker stand in a row across the track. When the green flag drops, the golfer blasts a golf ball and the other two blast off. Whoever is in the lead at a determined point some 30 yards downwind wins that go. There were three such goes.

The ball was hard to see; the motorcycle left the car as if it were anchored in place, and the golfer was anchored in place. In all three blast-offs, the ball beat the bike, by some 30, 15 and 20 feet respectively, leaving the car far behind.

On the weekend of the inaugural BMW Golf Championship (Sept. 7-9), Tiger Woods (who drives a Buick in the ads) beat everyone and did it again the next weekend at Atlanta to take the $10 million FedEx Cup. Clearly, he can drive anything he wants.