Downsizing Daytona

[NickHolt]

Downsizing Daytona

 

by David Manning for The New York Times

 

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Hanging in the corner of Joie Chitwood III’s office here is a neon construction vest with a red bull’s-eye in the middle and Chitwood’s name next to it. The vest is a not-so-subtle joke aimed at managers who are under pressure to get their buildings built on time and under budget.

 

Chitwood, the president of Daytona International Speedway, gets the joke, and the urgency. Eager to recapture the buzz and dollars that defined Nascar’s long ascendancy, Chitwood plans to spend two and a half years and up to $400 million to overhaul the 54-year old, 147,000-seat track, transforming the racing world’s equivalent of Wrigley Field.

 

With occasional breaks for events like the Daytona 500, Chitwood says he expects to replace the track’s rickety bleachers, minimalist concessions and maze of staircases and ramps. The stands along the backstretch will disappear, shrinking the capacity of the track by 31 percent, to 101,000 seats, a nod to declining attendance. Bathrooms, filled with rusting troughs, will be modernized.

 

Five grand entrances, 40 escalators and a dozen elevators (including some large enough to fit a show car) will be added to funnel fans — including a growing number of elderly ones — to wider seats and more lavish suites. The number of points of sale will triple, and wider concourses will include themed “neighborhoods” the size of football fields with a wider variety of food and merchandise choices, like those found at the newest N.F.L. stadiums.

 

The parallels with football are no accident. Like the N.F.L., racing circuits have been trying to attract fans who more and more prefer to watch games and races on high definition screens at home, where food and Internet connections are nearby. So track and stadium operators have been adding in-home experiences like better dining, air-conditioned seating and other amenities.

 

“We’re all in the same business,” said Chitwood, who oversaw the construction of Chicagoland Speedway from 1999 to 2002. “We need to get you off your couch and get you to come to the event. Only it’s a little tougher for me because you don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’m going to the Daytona 500 today.’ I’ve got to not just get you off the couch, but get you to make the plans because it’s not really a day-of ‘I’m going to go to the race’ kind of choice.”

 

Daytona International Speedway, which is across the street from Nascar’s headquarters, is one of many tracks trying to shrink to increase sagging revenue and attendance. Two weeks ago, International Speedway Corporation, which owns Daytona, said it planned to reduce capacity at some of its dozen other racetracks. Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the country’s largest racetrack, has also reduced its seating.

 

“We’re all trying to figure out how to make the facility appear more full,” said Doug Boles, the president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which plans to spend about $100 million on renovations. “We’re looking at how to bring technology to the fans’ seats, how does the experience compare to other facilities, how do you make the fans get to their seats easily, and are the concessions easy to find.”

 

In some ways, racing is following what baseball, football and other sports have been doing for two decades, starting with the Baltimore Orioles, who moved into Camden Yards, the first in a line of cozier stadiums. Building smaller venues with bells and whistles to attract high-end fans and corporate clients — and to get the average fan to spend more on food and merchandise — is now the norm.

 

But trying to jump-start revenue this way can backfire if prices are raised so high that they alienate budget-minded fans. This is no small matter in the racing world, where fans save their money for months to be able to attend events, and take coolers and drive campers to the races. Treating them as consumers of food and beverages instead of sightseers with a passion for racing could be a mistake, according to some observers.

 

“If all of what they do is optimize the experience, widen the seats, put more tchotchkes in there, they are missing the boat,” said Rich Luker, the founder of Luker on Trends and ESPN Sports Poll. Fans, he said, are “not there for the Cadillac experience; they’re there for a vacation.”

 

Chitwood said that to make more money with one-third as many seats, prices would have to rise, though some seats for marquee events like the Daytona 500 will still be less than $100, and fans can keep taking in their coolers. But he was unclear how many of these inexpensive seats there would be, and said he hoped that if the best races sold, fans might attend other less prominent events.

 

“You’re finally seeing us take the steps to get the size right,” Chitwood said. “If you have a smaller venue, you can provide a better experience over all, better traffic, better parking.”

 

Perhaps because Daytona is considered the sport’s spiritual home — the speedway calls itself the World Center of Racing — fans appear more willing to endure the mediocre food, the crowded bathrooms and the long lines that are part of the Daytona experience. However, Chitwood and his team know that the younger fans Nascar is trying to attract have come to expect the comforts and conveniences that define newer arenas and stadiums.

 

“Fans are much more sophisticated now,” said James Renne, a principal at the architectural firm Rossetti and the chief architect of the renovation. “You’ve already got N.F.L. stadiums that these fans go to, N.B.A., N.H.L. arenas that they go to. This is an acknowledgment that we need to do something that meets or exceeds their expectations.”

 

Part of the challenge of the renovation will be reorganizing the main grandstand, which is nearly a mile long. The speedway opened in 1959 — a relative youngster compared with sites like Fenway Park and Lambeau Field — and it expanded willy-nilly over 480 acres as the sport grew.

 

Despite its flaws, including labyrinthine concourses, traffic jams and an absence of shelter from rain, the track remains on nearly every racing fan’s bucket list. The Daytona 500 is the first race in the Sprint Cup season and the Super Bowl of the sport; it regularly draws celebrities and presidents.

 

“As a fan at Daytona, you dealt with what you had because it’s a temple of racing,” said Ron Pate, a truck driver from Houston who often attends races at Daytona with his wife, Lori. “Are the updates needed? Absolutely. Will I miss this? Absolutely.”

 

The renovation began soon after an elaborate groundbreaking July 5 that featured a race among three wheel loaders on the lawn in front of the main entrance. Construction teams are identifying and reorganizing the infrastructure buried beneath the property. An outer structure will be added to the grandstand that will include the escalators, elevators and wider concourses. Eventually, rows that now seat as many as 90 fans will be divided to make it easier for fans to get out and take a break. In all, about 20,000 tons of steel will be used, and parts of the grandstand will be raised as much as 60 feet to make the whole structure the same height as the tower, 170 feet.

 

“It’s kind of cramped inside right now,” said T. J. Waters, who drove two and a half hours from Brunswick, Ga., with his mother, Kim, to attend the groundbreaking and the Coke Zero 400 the next day. “We won’t miss any of it.”

 

The renovation would have been larger, but after the Florida State Legislature did not approve a sales tax subsidy worth several million dollars a year, several aspects of the project were scaled back. Even so, Chitwood has enough to do and plenty of people watching. His $400 million budget is about two-thirds of the money International Speedway Corporation plans to spend on capital projects.

 

“If we’re going to claim to be the Super Bowl of the sport, we have to step up,” Chitwood said. “If we don’t do it now, we’re never going to do it.”

[rebelracewriter]

put more tchotchkes in

 

[Whitey741]

put more tchotchkes in

 

 

Who knows without Google or Websters what this means? Interior decorators or anyone who dresses like them excluded .

 

said Rich Luker, the founder of Luker on Trends and ESPN Sports Poll

These are the guys that tell them what they need to do to attract new fans? It's no wonder, among all other things, that Nascar is steadily loosing their base!

[Team Hogan Racing Mom]

Lower the prices to fill the seats. Have they checked the true racing fans average income lately? People have less spendable income with prices the way they are. Gas is up which drives everything else up. (Except wages!)