by Dale Nixon
It was supposed to be a prime-time showcase for NASCAR; a shootout of the sport's best drivers, along with the most popular, in a complicated multi-"segment" format. No mention of quarters or time limits, so comparisons to the dreaded stick and ball sports crowd could be vigorously avoided.
The payoff to the winner? A cool million spacebucks.
No bragging rights on a Hawaiian beach, like the NFL. No extra World Series home game, as in baseball.
A million clams to the first guy to take the checkered flag.
Everyone else fights for the scraps.
So why, then, did tens of thousands of fans attend the Saturday night race at Charlotte nee Lowe's Motor Speedway, the acknowledged hub of the NASCAR universe, disguised as empty blue seats?
The problem is not unique to Charlotte's All-Star race, which in all fairness is a precursor to the main event Coca Cola 600 Memorial Day, but is certainly a subject the sport's movers and shakers would rather avoid. If NASCAR can't fill the seats in the epicenter of the racing community and future site of the sport's Hall of Fame, what sort of message is being sent by the fans? Have they become bloated by the bulimia of the NASCAR marketing machine? Have rising ticket prices created by sparkling new facilities crowded out the average fan? Were all the Dale Jr. fans merely sitting home, paralyzed with indecision and awaiting the next breathless report of the Chosen One's forthcoming departure from DEI?
It is probably a little of each.
First, any analysis of NASCAR's attendance figures comes with a caveat emptor - the sanctioning body and the participating tracks as a matter of policy do not provide specific attendance figures. Part of the reason is theoretical, so that a relatively full race day crowd can be inflated to sponsors and TV advertisers.
The other reason is a bit more pragmatic - race day is a don't-even-wait-for-the-ink -to-dry cash factory. A Federal Reserve shod by Goodyear. If the specific numbers are not exposed, there is no reason to believe there will be a corresponding interest by those seeking to collect taxes not already under the thumb of the ISC (International Speedway Corp, NASCAR's parent company and owner of 11 tracks on the Nextel Cup schedule). It is also a policy adhered to by Indianapolis Motor Speedway for roughly the last hundred years, in which the track was unable to provide the public with the actual number of seats until motor scribe Curt Cavin of the Indystar took it upon himself to count them by hand himself. Three times for accuracy. The magic number, incidentally, was 257,325.
Expansion of facilities has been a buzzword in the NASCAR world for most of the last decade, with tracks adding seats at a record pace and many seemingly involved in a battle to outglitz each other with sparkling overhauls of existing tracks, the latest being the jewel-like polishing of the track formally unaffectionately known as the "turd in the desert" - Las Vegas Motor Speedway. But expansion of some has left other facilities with actual racing heritage as forsaken as the first wives at a convention of middle-aged venture capitalists.
The Mother's Day weekend race at Darlington, SC the previous week was also marked by vast expanses of empty aluminum bleachers, despite being one of the few up-close-and-personal old school track remaining on the Nextel *(soon to be Sprint) Cup calendar. For those who wish for the "old days" it was an opportunity missed.
"When I was at Darlington I was trying to sell every ticket I could, which was the only way to make the case. Even today, you hear all of this stuff about California not selling out. California sells 80,000 tickets or more," NASCAR Vice President for Corporate Communications Jim Hunter told Myrtle Beach Online. At Darlington for the spring race when I was there, we'd be fortunate if we sold 45,000 tickets. In the day and age of public companies and looking out for investors, it didn't come as a surprise."
As Hunter noted, California Speedway, a state-of-the-art facility built on a reclaimed industrial waste site in the largest market on the NASCAR schedule, has a similar problem with invisible fans. Speedway president Gillian Zucker, brought in to prop up the attendance figures by the NASCAR hierarchy last year, offered Yahoo's Jerry Bonkowski a novel explanation:
Zucker claimed that part of the reason so many empty seats could be seen was that many fans were in the midway area and under the grandstands "shopping during the race and … at concession stands."
Longtime fans have lamented the multitude of changes in the NASCAR race machine, in which corporate promotions and TV scripting (the phantom debris yellow) have supplanted on-track action. The WWE-style weekly subplot lines of heroes (Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jimmy Johnson, Tony Stewart) versus villains (The Busch Brothers, Gordon and Johnson (to Earnhardt fans) and rising rookie villain Juan Montoya) is tired and simplistic, while adding precious little to the drama. Earnhardt, the biggest star in the sport, has noticed the seats are not as full as they were a few years back.
"There was an oversized expectation to be able to fill those seats out there," Earnhardt said, referring to the 92,000 seats at the track 50 miles east of Los Angeles. "People in Hollywood could care less."
The rising ticket costs have been offered as an integral part of the problem, with a combination of new facilities and catering to big-money corporate luxury box clientele squeezing the average fan from the track.
Overexposure is not a valid explanation, NASCAR President Brian France told Monte Dutton of the Gaston Gazette. While admitting that both live attendance and television ratings were down in the 2006 season, France said it would take some time to verify the end result of the sweeping overhaul of the NASCAR rulebook, one which took the term "Chase for the Cup" to the brink of Lindsey Logan-like self-immolation. France, as befits the head of a multi-billion dollar entertainment empire, was unapologetic for shaking things up.
“Some are going to think we went too far, and some are going to think we didn’t go far enough,” said the NASCAR chairman. “We try to think we got it just right.”
So in other words, NASCAR's right. And the rest, including those seated in the empty seats, are undoubtedly wrong.
Somebody get them a beer, they have been out there for a while.
For the rest, good seats are still available.
