By Lou Modestino
With billions of dollars guaranteed for NASCAR TV rights til 2020 and 2024, discussions have now surfaced of removing those empty grandstands at many Sprint Cup venues. On television, those empty seats look Bad – Bad with a capital B. We’ve seen those empty spaces disguised with sponsors banners, and broadcast networks have been very careful about not panning the spaces with their coverage. Don’t you think that those hollow canyons must have a psychological effect on fans in attendance. They must think, “Why did I come to this race?”
By now followers of motor sports must have heard and read that removal of stands is set to begin at a number of venues. For instance, the backstretch seats at Daytona are scheduled for dismantling. It’s been announced that the removal will be part and parcel of the updating of that track in order to increase the strength of fences on the finish line. (That was the area that Kyle Larson’s Nationwide car tore down the fence, and fans were hit with debris from the wreck in February during SpeedWeeks of this year.) Yet, couldn’t there be another motive as well?
In fact a recent Barron’s issue focused on the International Speedway Corp.’s plans to remove grandstand seats in order to increase ticket demands. (First of all, in order to increase demand, you have to give the paying fan something to get excitied about, not like this past weekend’s Cup race at MIS that was typical of the fuel economy run.)
Among ways to increase attendance, there’s an effort being made to draw in the younger Wi-Fi set so that they can interact with other fans during the event. NASCAR failed in the past to connect with younger fans because Cup race tickets have been way beyond their reach. Other sports entities like the NFL discovered that even before NASCAR did. So, are race tickets going to be reduced? Doubt it.
But, getting back to the dismantling of those empty grandstands, most of the 1-1/2 mile tracks with about 150,000 seats will more than likely be the first to do it. In the event that ticket sales eventually do pick up, they can always be reassembled. But it’s not likely to happen soon given the current economic situation and slow ticket demand. It’s obvious that those seats were added at one time without giving much thought that the demand for them would end at one time or another.