Interesting Article

[CommonSenseRacing]

Read this article on NASCAR.com:

 

There are houses now where the old racetrack used to be, each of them trim and tidy with a two-car garage and a screened-in porch. There are pretty palmettos and tea olives along the entranceway, handsome black street lamps down each avenue, and a brick sign by the highway bearing the new subdivision's name. All indications of the property's former life have been bulldozed, graded, and covered with sod.

 

Newcomers would never guess that for nearly three decades this was the spot where NASCAR reached down to the masses, where grass-roots racers fired up their late models and spun around the same tiny oval their fathers did, where legends like Earnhardt and Allison showed up to sign autographs when the big show was competing nearby. It wasn't big-time auto racing; it wasn't even close. But it certainly felt like it to the drivers and fans who turned out every Saturday night.

 

And now it's gone, its modest Victory Lane converted into someone's front yard. It's hard to blame the owner, who bought the property in the 1960s for a few hundred thousand dollars, and sold it to a developer three years ago for more than $1 million. No one would turn their back on that kind of profit. But in the process, another metropolitan area in the heart of NASCAR country lost its local track, and more drivers were forced to find somewhere else to race. That is, if they didn't just give up the sport entirely.

 

It's but a single snapshot of an entire industry, one that's struggled to find its niche within the wider entertainment landscape as well as NASCAR itself. Gone are the days when tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds spread money across more than 100 local tracks in the Winston Racing Series. Some tracks have shut down, while others have been dropped by a sanctioning body trying to streamline its weekly program. As spring arrives and the short-track season opens, there are roughly 60 venues flying the NASCAR banner.

 

And their promoters have a tough job. All those stories you've seen recently about the issues suddenly facing the Nextel Cup series? The folks in the weekly program have been dealing with them for years. At the local level, struggles to sell tickets, get attention, and control costs are a fact of life.

 

"It's not easy to successfully operate a weekly facility," NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter said. "You have to go out and sell sponsorships, you have to pay prize money, you have to keep up the facilities. There's so much more competition out there for the entertainment dollar. I think people really have to work at it. You can't be a weekly track operator part time. It's a full-time job to really be successful at it."

 

NASCAR's weekly series seemed to languish after Winston was forced to abandon its longtime financial support of the program due to the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998. Hunter, a former Darlington Raceway president who covered his share of short-track races as a motorsports journalist, was tasked with resurrecting it. The business model was revised, the number of tracks was pared down to better distribute sponsor money, the awards banquet was even moved from Orlando, Fla. to Las Vegas.

 

Bob Duvall, who once promoted a Pennsylvania short track, and George Silbermann, NASCAR's managing director of racing operations, were charged with managing weekly and touring programs that even Hunter will admit NASCAR has struggled with. Why do facilities in Stockton, Calif., and Summerville, S.C. shut down while others in Irwindale, Calif., and Elko, Minn., thrive? In many ways, for the same reasons some Nextel Cup venues flourish while others only subsist.

 

"I think what you're really seeing is an entire industry in flux. You have some of the older, shall we say weaker tracks going out of business, and there has been a rash of tracks closing recently. That's due to a number of factors. Some of them just haven't kept up with new times. Some of them, the land value has exceeded the return you can get as a racetrack. But by the same token, if you really look across the industry, you'll see there's a new crop of racetracks that have come on the scene in the last 10 years," Silbermann said.

 

"These are modern, purpose-built facilities. These are facilities that now have suites to accommodate guests, playgrounds to accommodate children, a lot of things that were unthinkable at short tracks 15 or 20 years ago. They're the ones that are making the transition successfully. But it is a tough industry to make a living at, that's for sure."

 

To Hunter, development is the biggest threat to local tracks today. In many areas, especially at the height of the housing boom, land simply became too valuable, and racetrack owners cashed in. It's not a new issue, and not one unique to the weekly series -- Riverside International Raceway, a legendary Southern California road course that hosted the Cup series for 30 years, was sold off and turned into a shopping center.

 

Yet in many eyes, NASCAR itself is partly culpable for the struggles of its short track series. When racetracks shift their Nextel Cup events to Saturday nights, race fans are forced to make a difficult choice -- stay home and watch the big show on television, or pay $12 to see the locals? Some local tracks have tried to show Cup races on big screens, while others have urged their patrons to watch them later on videotape or TiVo. Such tactics have met with decidedly mixed results.

 

But NASCAR's main event competes on Saturday nights only eight times a season, leaving plenty of weekend evenings free for local venues. A larger problem may be the sense many local track owners have of feeling forgotten by a sanctioning body that orbits around Nextel Cup. NASCAR has tried to assuage that, running spots on Nextel Cup television broadcasts urging viewers to find their nearest local track on the Internet. Hunter said local track owners have been pleased with the results, which on its best day yielded 14,000 hits.

 

The root cause for short-track struggles likely lies somewhere in the middle, between owners who are often former racers and not the savviest of marketers or businessmen, and a sanctioning body that let its grass-roots effort wither for too long. The reality, as Silbermann points out, is that many Nextel Cup tracks have to work harder than ever to sell tickets. At the local level, it's the same issue, only magnified.

 

In the end it comes down to a combination of geography and business plan, and a track's ability to strike a chord with its community. Some venues find a niche in large population areas, others become institutions in their own towns, others reinvent themselves by upgrading and attracting new fans. But regardless of what NASCAR does, the struggles of local track owners are never going away. There's always that risk that one day, someone will be planting roses in a backyard where the pit area used to be.

 

A lot of people would like to see a new track built in S.A., I understand their desirer, but S.A. closing may wind up being a good thing for asphalt racing in Texas. I know that will not be a popular statement especially for the racers who have just finished updating their cars and were ready for the season. I only state this as a possible outcome, provided the remaining track owners are able to accommodate the displaced racers and improve their classes car counts, which in turn improve the racing, which may draw more people to the tracks. You could say it’s the chicken and egg scenario. Change will always come at a price and sometime you have to take 2 steps backwards in order to move forward.

 

JMO

[Definitive]

A good example:

 

 

Alamo Dragway.........San Antonio Raceway.

 

From what I understand,the former is flourishing.

[texasprd]

Do you mean the latter (SAR)? Alamo has been closed for some time - SAR just hosted a national IHRA event.

[CommonSenseRacing]

That was one of the examples I was thinking of, but drag racing falls into a different category, sort of like comparing apples to oranges. HMP built a drag strip and I’m pretty sure the Baytown owners weren’t happy, to put it kindly. I don’t claim to know the exact numbers, but I don’t believe that it had a catastrophic effect on Baytown’s business. Due to the fact that anyone with a car or motorcycle can decide to go to the track and race provided the vehicle passes a safety inspection, drag strips have a much broader pool of prospects to draw from.

 

Regarding the tire debates that go on here at TXSZ, local drag racers do not contend with the tire rule issues, but they also don’t race for a points fund, everything has its price.

[ProTree]

Commonsense,our locals get rewarded with cash at our end of the year banquet,and the Champions in the 3 classes get new Snap-on Tool Chest to boot,plus local racers that sign up for Summit Racing Series X points get monies also from Summit Racing.Had a racer last season from SAR in the Summit X Points sign up for the program which cost $10 dollars and won over 12 grand.Cant speak for the other straight line tracks,but most offer alot of points programs with end of season payouts as well as weekly payouts.