Build another Bristol? It's not as simple as it sounds

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- The seats climb inconceivably toward the Tennessee sky, the racetrack tilts to an impossibly steep angle, and on an overcast day the Blue Ridge Mountains cast the entire place in a spooky haze. But at Bristol Motor Speedway, nothing matches the noise. Once cars roll onto that white concrete surface, the wall of sound builds to an ear-splitting crescendo. The place almost vibrates from a horsepower-induced decibel level that can be felt right down to the bones.

It's part of what makes this place so ... well, the only word is overwhelming. It's far from the prettiest speedway you'll ever see, far from the fanciest, far from just about anything but mountains, horses and cows. But experiencing all those people and all that power in such a small, confined place can be staggering. It's easy to see why 160,000 spectators pack this place with regularity, and why the speedway doesn't have to spend a dime advertising a Sprint Cup race. The place sells itself.

It also makes you wonder -- why hasn't anyone built another Bristol? Why hasn't some executive from Speedway Motorsports Inc. or International Speedway Corp. taken the blueprint of this massively popular facility and constructed an exact replica in some other region that NASCAR is trying to court? Why is there this insistence upon building nearly identical 1.5-mile tri-ovals, when one race day at Bristol makes it so obvious what kind of action the race fans prefer to see?

It seems like such a no-brainer, except that it isn't. Racetrack companies like big tri-ovals for the same reason cities once favored multi-purpose sports facilities, because they're capable of hosting more than one kind of event. A short track, by nature, is more limited. But even if somebody built another big soup bowl of a racetrack and plunked it down in Los Angeles or Seattle or Denver, there would be no guarantee of success -- particularly success of the magnitude this place has experienced in the last decade. Bristol Motor Speedway flourishes because of the unique confluence of circumstances that created it, circumstances that cannot necessarily be manufactured somewhere else.

The place really has no business being this popular. Located deep in Appalachia, far from any major metropolitan area, in a region of the Volunteer State with just 6,000 hotel rooms, Bristol is demographically and geographically akin to places like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro and Darlington, small-town Southern tracks that struggled to keep up with progress and lost races as a result. There are so few places to stay that roughly 60 percent of attendees camp. Others find lodging wherever they can, from offseason ski areas in North Carolina to unused dorms at nearby Virginia Intermont College.

Perfection

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This isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the kind of new or emerging market targeted by NASCAR executives. The nearest big city is Knoxville, two hours away, and a stretch of the definition of a big city. The Tri-Cities is a peaceful, bucolic region full of friendly people and striking scenery, the kind of place where you see livestock grazing in fields next to the road. Its sporting arena bookends are the Mini Dome, East Tennessee State's multi-purpose athletic facility, and the big speedway looming over highway 11E.

Everything tells you that this rural Southern track should be struggling just as so many other rural Southern tracks have, living in constant fear of schedule realignment or the whims of Bruton Smith's imagination. Yet for two weekends a year, people clamor to the place. Bristol's growth in many ways mirrored the explosive growth of NASCAR itself, mushrooming from the 70,000-seat facility purchased by SMI in 1996 to the behemoth on display today. The waiting list was cut off at 84,000 before it was replaced by a lottery for the few season tickets that become available each year. Former track owner Larry Carrier, or so the story goes, once issued a press release urging spectators not to show up. He didn't have room for any more of them.

Bristol deals with the same factors that have weighed down so many other venues, but prospers in spite of them. That's partly due to the impact of Smith, who has spent $180 million turning this place into the celebrated venue it is today, stopping at nothing -- even the side of a mountain, which he detonated out of the way -- to meet the ever-increasing ticket demand at his short track. That's a stark contrast to what happened at North Wilkesboro and Darlington, which withered from neglect. But talk to the people who run Bristol, and you'll find there's another reason for its strange success -- one that actually has nothing to do with the speedway at all.

In this case, Bristol's location on the map works in its favor. The racetrack may be Southern, but its fan base speaks with a distinct Midwestern accent. The facility's position in northeast Tennessee makes it accessible to fans in places like Ohio and Indiana, for whom Bristol is an easy drive. The place has added roughly 90,000 seats since SMI purchased it 12 years ago, and the vast majority of those have been sold to race fans in the lower Midwest who can drive straight into town via Interstates 77 and 81. The NASCAR market saturation that exists in other parts of the South is absent here, because so many of Bristol's ticket holders come from somewhere else.

Yes, the scarcity of short tracks on the Sprint Cup schedule surely helps, as does the theatric nature of the venue itself. But there's no single thing that makes Bristol the extraordinary place that it is, nothing that can be easily transplanted to another city and stamped out like a car license plate. And even if they tried -- and they might, given that one or more of ISC's future speedway ventures are projected as short tracks -- the imitation would always pale when compared to the majesty and spectacle of the real thing.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer