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.

"We're prepared to open more free camping for guests to spend the night on our property and do away with some of the expenses that they would have to otherwise incur to come to the event," said Talladega president Rick Humphrey, whose facility has a race looming April 27. "So it is a time when we are looking at other ways to do things, how to get the fans to come, and keep them coming back. In this time when we're seeing economic times like we haven't seen in years past, those are the things we're trying to do to offset some of those costs."

But much of that is beyond a race promoter's control. Gasoline prices are a real concern, given the tremendous distances race fans often travel to see events at iconic facilities like Charlotte and Talladega. Topping off the tank, buying provisions for the weekend, paying the usual steep, multi-night-minimum-stay rates at hotels -- stacked up against all that, a reduced ticket price or free hamburgers in an all-you-can-eat grandstand carry only so much weight.

Spitzer and NASCAR

Could Elliott Spitzer's resignation as governor of New York have set back efforts to build a NASCAR track in New York City? Humpy Wheeler thinks so.

Spitzer, who spoke briefly at last year's Cup awards ceremony and has a brother-in-law who works for Hendrick Motorsports, was an avid race fan, according to the Lowe's Motor Speedway president.

"That was one of the many downsides of the governor of New York giving his post up. He was a real race fan, and I felt like sooner or later he probably would have come up with somewhere for us to go," Wheeler said. "That's not to be now."

Spitzer, a Democrat, resigned March 12 after being linked to a prostitution ring. "He was very interested in NASCAR, and he was very interested in having a NASCAR race in the New York area," Wheeler said. "We'll have to search for another advocate now."

"There are so many elements that go into attending one of these events that are above and beyond the ticket price," Humphrey said. "That is something that has to be kept in mind when you start marketing to these folks. Our ticket information shows that our fans travel an average of 300 miles to get here, so when you take that into consideration and you look at gas prices, do you need to grow your Alabama crowd more? Those are things we try to keep in mind and things we do when we sit down and look at times like this."

Wheeler wants to do more, things that would require unlikely intervention on the part of NASCAR. He wants to slow the cars down to foster competition in tighter packs. He wants to alter the points system to award points for things like competitive passes. "If I had my way, I'd give one point for every competitive pass on the racetrack," he said. "I'm talking about at the front. I'd give these guys a reason to make the move in the first 60 or 70 percent of the race."

Why suggest such drastic changes? "We can't overemphasize the fact that it's the race itself on the track that given day that's more responsible for selling tickets than anything else," he said, and he's probably correct. But like gas prices, such things are beyond his control. Right now his focus is on more realistic efforts, like turning his ticket office into something of a concierge desk.

"If somebody calls down here and wants a room, we'll get it for them. If they want a place to put their dog up, we'll find it. It's full service," Wheeler said. "If they want to know where to get a prescription filled, we've got to tell them. I don't know that down the road that we won't go get their prescription filled for them. You've got to reach out to people and make them feel more at home, and make them feel better about coming to a place."

But the fans have to want to make that call to the ticket office first, no guarantee in this economic climate. Track promoters have to go back a decade or more to find previous times this tough.

"If you take everything and look at what it costs to come to races and so forth, I would say it's as trying a time as it's been since I've been at Talladega, and that's 11 years," Humphrey said. "I guess that's probably the best way to put it. There are so many things going on around the country, and so many things that add to the expense of coming to these events that you have to take into consideration as you market to these folks."

But for the people who sell tickets -- and are very much on the front lines in NASCAR, more in touch with the average fan than just about anyone else in the industry -- it's all part of the job. "We've always had challenges," Wheeler said. "This is just another one."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.