The seats and seatbacks have been removed and replaced with new ones of different colors, but the original seat supports still remain. Those metal armrests, sides and footings still carry the teal hue that defined professional sports in the Charlotte area for more than a decade, still bear the logo of the coliseum that fell to the wrecking ball in June of 2007. They once accommodated spectators for NBA playoff games, ACC basketball tournaments, and the Final Four. Now they've found a new home in a new sport, having been reincarnated as grandstand seats at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

Track officials bought all 22,000 of the old Charlotte Coliseum seats at auction for $1 each, and installed them along part of the frontstretch that had been concrete bleachers. In something of an homage to their prior existence, the teal color and the old coliseum logos were left untouched. They're but one example of a larger process, one where racetrack management companies scour aging speedways and shut-down athletic arenas for anything that can be salvaged and put to use in a NASCAR facility.

Frontstretch seats at Charlotte, infield scoring towers at Daytona, iron fencing at Atlanta, grandstands at Darlington -- they've all come, in totality or in part, from somewhere else. So have pipes and concession equipment and bathroom facilities. Some seating areas at the drag strip being built at Lowe's Motor Speedway came from the former NASCAR facility at Rockingham, N.C. With steel and aluminum prices skyrocketing and public racetrack companies under pressure to watch expenditures, recycling old parts of old racetracks has become a popular way to upgrade and save money at the same time.

"We are a public company, and we have an obligation to our stockholders to keep our return on investment as high as possible," said Lauri Wilks, executive vice president at Lowe's Motor Speedway, part of the Speedway Motorsports Inc. empire. "Therefore, we have an obligation to keep our expenses as low as possible. I don't think we're sacrificing any quality of the goods. But when you look at steel at all-time highs, aluminum at all-time highs, if you can save on the material cost, it just makes business sense. It's the prudent business thing to do."

It's a fairly common practice among the sport's two major racetrack companies -- Charlotte-based SMI and Daytona Beach-based International Speedway Corp. -- which each have a number of properties among which they can shuffle parts and pieces. When Atlanta Motor Speedway needed wrought iron fencing to replace that which was destroyed in a 2005 tornado, some was brought in from Rockingham. Before the track's infield was renovated in 2005, the twin scoring towers at Daytona International Speedway were refugees from the bankrupt Ontario Motor Speedway in California, now the site of a commercial park.

"If you look in today's market, a new scoreboard, they were in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars if not past a million dollars. A scoreboard is a pretty major capital expenditure," said Andrew Gurtis, director of operations at ISC, which operates the Daytona track. "Any asset that works at a modern facility, once it's lived its useful life at whatever facility at which it resides, it probably has a useful life at the next track down the line. Like any business, we want to utilize our assets to their fullest potential. Whether it's a matter of technology or the business itself moving on to the next, greatest thing, there's somebody in the marketplace to whom that has value." (Continued)