NASCAR's premier showman has always relied on the extraordinary to help coax people through the front gate. Exploding automobiles. A giant, fire-breathing, mechanical dinosaur munching on wrecked cars. Human cannonballs, trapeze artists, rock stars and million-dollar paydays. Even a mock strafing run of an enemy village, full of thatched huts that blew up as U.S. military aircraft flew overhead.

H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president and general manager of Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, has never been one for the conventional. But these days, not even pyrotechnic extravaganzas are enough. Not with the price of everything from gas to groceries creeping ever higher, giving potential ticket buyers more than enough reasons to stay home. These are tough times for all track promoters, especially those with venues featuring more than 100,000 seats. The stagnant, near-recessed economy can't be won over by the Red Hot Chili Peppers or a shoot-'em-up pre-race show.

Selling tickets right now -- especially of the volume that 165,000-seat Lowe's Motor Speedway is trying to sell for its upcoming Memorial Day race -- is difficult. More difficult than it's been in a long time. So difficult that tracks are trying to woo customers with almost anything that might relieve some of the financial burden inherent to attending a Sprint Cup event.

"It's probably more challenging than anything we've run into in the last decade," Wheeler said, "particularly for the tracks that have more than 100,000 seats. There's a number of reasons for it. The economy, if we're not in a recession, I don't know what we're in. We keep dodging that word. But it's tough."

The most expensive seats at any track, Wheeler said, are rarely difficult to sell, just as the top tier of income brackets are rarely affected by fluctuations in the economy. But the typical grandstand seat, the one usually filled by a middle-class spectator, is another matter. Those are the kind of folks who understandably might balk at traveling to a race with gasoline near $4 a gallon. Those are the kind of folks track promoters like Wheeler don't want to lose.

"You start getting into your upper-middle and middle class, that's where your working people are, and where so many of your fans come from," he said. "So we have great empathy for what so many people are going through, and our job is to try and make it as easy as possible. Just like whoever thought up 0-percent financing, for all intents and purposes, saved the automobile industry. We've got to come up with ideas like that to help get through this flat time."

They're trying to get creative, expanding on packages and amenities that could be the difference between somebody attending a race or staying at home. It goes beyond simply reducing ticket prices, which Lowe's and some other tracks have done. It means offering multi-day tickets for a two-figure cost, it means offering things like all-you-can-eat grandstands, in the case of Talladega Superspeedway it means potentially opening up more of its vast acreage for free camping. (Continued)