New Hampshire deserves better than uncertain fate

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Police cars here bear the slogan "Where the West begins," and it's easy to see why. Buffalo roam in fields alongside Interstate 35. In the Stockyards area of town, visitors can stumble across a live rodeo at the old Cowtown Coliseum and listen to country music at the self-professed world's largest honky-tonk. Nearby Dallas may be the cosmopolitan city where high-heeled debutantes spend daddy's oil money, but Fort Worth seems the place where cowboys come to get their Stetsons professionally creased.

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And on the barren, windswept north end of town looms Texas Motor Speedway, which is the same size as the other 1.5-mile racetracks in the Speedway Motorsports Inc. family, but like everything else in this state just seems bigger. Of course, president Eddie Gossage fosters that image at every turn by promoting his market (six million people), his purse ($7.2 million), and his crowd (160,000 seats) as the biggest in the 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup.

Even though it was technically never awarded a date by NASCAR -- the first came from the old North Wilkesboro Speedway, the second from North Carolina Speedway -- Texas has been one of the sport's biggest modern success stories, a place where the series has been fully embraced since its debut here in 1997. It's helped that SMI chairman Bruton Smith built the facility on a palatial scale, and that local media is savvy to the sport even in a market dominated by major-league teams. With two dates now, the sellouts aren't quite as guaranteed as they once were. But this isn't California Speedway, either.

If only for those pesky white-tailed deer. If track officials are to believed, their ticket sales for the fall event have been slowed somewhat by the placement of Texas' second Nextel Cup date on the opening weekend of the state's deer-hunting season, an occasion that prompts an estimated one million Texans to reach for rifles and orange vests. It wouldn't hurt Gossage's feelings if his track's second race was moved to an earlier spot in the Chase. Now, with SMI's $340 million acquisition of New Hampshire International Speedway, the opportunity is there to do just that.

As much as New Hampshire means to NASCAR -- and given its Northeast placement and consistent sellout crowds, it's arguably one of the most important circuits on the schedule -- it isn't the ideal place to begin the Chase. NASCAR's playoff needs a big kickoff, and it's tough to get that in Loudon, where the races are often one-sided and the region's media are busy drooling over the Red Sox and Patriots. Switching the Chase opener to this big track in Fort Worth makes sense for SMI, which would benefit from better ticket sales, and for NASCAR, which would see its postseason opener hyped to the level it deserves. (Continued)