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.

Of course, that still leaves the matter of what to do with the newly re-christened New Hampshire Motor Speedway. It seems everyone in this sport has already mentally shipped one of its dates to Las Vegas, the 142,000-seat track in the desert that Smith has spent millions of dollars to rebuild. "We need to go to Vegas twice," said Washington state native Kasey Kahne. "We need to go to tracks where you can fill up the grandstands and sell souvenirs."

No move imminent

Even as Bruton Smith was announcing the sale of NHIS to SMI, he said there are no plans to move one of the Loudon track's race dates to Las Vegas.

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One problem -- they've been doing just that in New Hampshire since 1993. Yes, the Granite State is kind of a quiet, introspective place, but don't let that fool you. The short-track racing roots in New England run as deep as anywhere else in the country. The rosters of Nextel Cup teams are stocked with people from Connecticut and Maine. Boston is the one big city in the Northeast where NASCAR seems to have something of a footprint, and it all has to do with the 1-mile flat track that founder Bob Bahre scraped out of the rocky New England soil.

Sure, the infield facilities are somewhat outdated, the location is kind of remote, and the surrounding area is undeveloped. But from a racing perspective, the people in New Hampshire have done everything right. They've sold out every Nextel Cup race they've ever hosted. They've provided a marquee venue for support series. They've loomed as a mecca for every gearhead from Hanover to Hartford. And they deserve better than to have one of their races taken from them and shipped out West.

NASCAR wants sellout crowds. A few years ago, before attendance figures began to slip, the series demanded sellout crowds. For some tracks, a full house on race day was the only way to escape the shadow of schedule realignment. But at times the sport send mixed messages on the subject, as it did in 2004 when International Speedway Corp. took an event from Darlington Raceway on the heels of one sellout crowd and another that fell only a few hundred tickets short. "Unfortunately, it wasn't quite good enough," NASCAR chairman Brian France said at the time.

What's good enough for New Hampshire? Selling out its 101,000 seats? Providing a touchstone for racers in the region? Giving NASCAR a presence like it enjoys nowhere else in the Northeast? The little track in Loudon has done all those things, been an ideal steward to the sport, and now even it must live with the speculation that one of its coveted dates will be shipped somewhere else. Evidently, people haven't learned much from all those empty seats we've seen in places like California and Atlanta, mega-facilities that struggle under the weight of their own expectations.

So send a brigade of engineers and a fleet of concrete trucks to Loudon. Slice off one end of the track and turn it into a three-quarter-miler. Build up some banking to spice up the racing. Add 20,000 more seats to meet the ticket demand. Juggle its two dates on the Nextel Cup schedule, a complete overhaul of which is well overdue. Maybe even move that Chase opener out here to Texas, where the highway traffic can be suffocating but there's always a big steak at Cattlemen's and a Shiner Bock on tap.

But keep two races in Loudon. The track deserves it. The sport needs it. Anything else would seem like turning your back on an old friend.