Overbuilt racetracks make NASCAR seem less healthy

From a stock-car racing perspective, it was the best thing to happen in South Florida since a high school student named Bobby Allison convinced his mother to let him drive in an amateur division at Hialeah Speedway. The reconfiguration of Homestead-Miami Speedway from a flat track built for Indy-cars to a layout with variable banking up to 20 degrees has transformed the 1.5-mile oval into a much more suitable host for NASCAR's season finale. No, it's not Bristol. But it's a much more entertaining place than it was before the changes were enacted in 2004.

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There's another reason Homestead works, beyond the irresistible tropical backdrop complete with 80-degree November temperatures and royal palm trees swaying in the breeze. The grandstand capacity is 65,000, modest for a track in one of the largest metro areas NASCAR visits each year. Surely, Curtis Gray has an eye on eventual expansion -- what track president doesn't? But Homestead's current grandstand capacity allows it to keep ticket demand high, important in a relatively new market where the sport and the populace are still warming to one another. Sunday's final Nextel Cup event is a sellout, so series brass won't have to worry about television cameras panning over sections of empty seats.

In fact, it's the second consecutive sellout for NASCAR, which also attracted a full house in Phoenix last week. The capacity of that racetrack is 76,000, as large as an NFL stadium. But it's still dwarfed by the mammoth facilities that comprise the bulk of the series schedule. In boom times, those 150,000-seat edifices stand as testaments to the sport's popularity. But when they're not selling out, they can be an albatross. It's no coincidence that the last three sellouts in Nextel Cup -- Kansas, Phoenix, and now Homestead -- have come in moderately-sized facilities seating 81,000 or less.

Those are still huge crowds, as big as some for Southeastern Conference football games, but when viewed through the NASCAR prism they seem tiny by comparison. This is a sport that's all about grandeur, and built facilities to match. The seating capacities are beyond enormous: 165,000 at Charlotte, 160,000 at Bristol and Texas, 143,000 at Talladega, 142,000 at Las Vegas, 132,000 at Michigan, 124,000 at Atlanta, 92,000 at California. Maybe once the sport could fill tracks like that with consistency, but not right now. Still, the numbers are deceiving -- a "disappointing" crowd at Texas or Charlotte would still fill the Louisiana Superdome or Rose Bowl beyond capacity -- and present a picture of the sport's overall health that is far from accurate.

Yet the misdiagnosis is there for everyone to see on television, in the form of empty seats. While there's no question this sport has a battle on its hands right now in terms of television ratings -- of course, so does nearly everyone else, from the NBA and Major League Baseball to prime-time network series -- this perceived lack of attendance is another matter altogether. Empty seats at places like California and Atlanta aren't an indication that the death knell is sounding for NASCAR, as some would have you believe. They're proof that some track builders became too ambitious and too shortsighted, and assumed the rocket ride that lasted until through the 2001 season would keep going forever.

It's hard to blame them, really, especially since other sports have made similar moves. Hockey dug its own grave by attempting to cater to Southern snowbirds with a "Sun Belt strategy" that moved teams from smaller, traditional markets into larger, newer ones that have yet to deliver on their promise. Baseball's expansion into Florida, the traditional home of spring training, produced two franchises that never really caught on. Basketball moved into Canada just a decade ago, and one team has already relocated. In each of those cases, markets were misjudged. The Florida Marlins may have drawn 66,000 for a World Series game, but that doesn't make them a success at the gate. Similarly, one sellout crowd at Talladega or Michigan doesn't mean the track can do the same thing twice a year, every year.

It didn't help that track builders have historically shown little restraint. The ticket demand for places like Fenway Park, Lambeau Field or Cameron Indoor Stadium is so great that their respective owners could add seats year after year and still have people clamoring to get in. But they don't. It's different in NASCAR, where the model is to build, build, and build until there are more seats than there are people waiting in line to buy tickets for them. California wouldn't be plagued by attendance questions today if that track's ownership had kept grandstand capacity at the 71,000 it was when Roger Penske built it. Smaller tracks like Homestead and Darlington once seemed woefully behind in terms of attendance. Now they're among the few that don't have to worry about looking bad on TV.

Many of the issues dogging the sport today are of its own making. Television ratings are down, but they're being compared to record highs. Fans may grow disenchanted, but they've been catered too for so long that some have developed a sense of entitlement, and take it personally that the series has grown too popular to let everyone into the garage to get an autograph anymore. And facilities were overbuilt because people failed to recognize temporary spikes in attendance for what they were, leading to the empty seats we've seen at so many racetracks this year.

It's as if the pendulum has swung back to the middle, just as a winning race team eventually comes back to the pack. Fans love to rant about how NASCAR is foundering, but they all have an axe to grind -- they don't like the COT, or Japanese cars, or that they couldn't get their money back after a rainout, or that Tony Stewart walked by without signing their die-cast. Sure, when compared to 2001, the numbers are down. But you could say the same thing about Major League Baseball in comparison to1998 and the Sosa-McGuire home run chase, or the NBA in comparison to Michael Jordan's final title that same year. None of this exists in a vacuum. The extremes are always the exceptions. The true value is somewhere in the middle.

And NASCAR's middle isn't a bad place to be. The sport still draws an average of more than 100,000 spectators per weekend, posts TV numbers good enough to justify the investments of sponsors, and makes more cash than any of us will ever be able to count. No question, there are issues -- there isn't enough driver development, the late-afternoon starting times are universally reviled, and purses are sometimes embarrassingly small. But Sunday in Homestead, before a sellout crowd, the sun will set on this NASCAR season. And in the middle of February, before another sellout crowd, the sun will rise again.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.