For some NASCAR tracks, bigger doesn't mean better (cont'd)

There are certainly the exceptions. Bristol packs in 160,000 be it rain or snow, boom or bust. The hardy folks in New Hampshire have sold out every Sprint Cup event that 101,000-seat track has ever hosted. At 141,000-seat Las Vegas, the turnstiles cha-ching like slot machines. Martinsville could be close to capacity with a strong walk-up crowd Sunday. Pocono and Phoenix still attract race fans like metal filings to a magnet. But the sight Saturday night in Charlotte -- a key Chase event right in NASCAR's backyard -- made it painfully clear that for many of the big boys, those mammoth venues with grandstands that seem to stretch onward to infinity, these are hand-wringing times.

Did International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports Inc., the rival conglomerates that between them own 19 of the 22 tracks on the Sprint Cup tour, miscalculate by building seat upon seat upon seat when NASCAR was exploding into national prominence? Well, they certainly bucked conventional thinking, which was the move in nearly every other sport from oversized arenas to more intimate facilities that put a premium on fan amenities. Testaments to contraction abound -- Angels Stadium in Anaheim shrinking from 64,600 to 45,050, Soldier Field in Chicago being reconfigured from 74,000 to 57,000, the Baltimore Orioles moving from an old park seating 54,000 to a new one seating 48,000. When the city of Charlotte blew up its old coliseum, which held a bloated 24,042, they replaced it with a new arena holding 19,026 seats. Even the new Yankee Stadium will accommodate 4,000 fewer fans than its predecessor.

Of course, Lambeau Field in Green Bay expanded its seating capacity in a 2002 retrofit, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is leaving 66,000-seat Texas Stadium after this season for a new 80,000-seat structure. But to paraphrase Steve Martin, the overwhelming trend has been to get small. Keep ticket demand high. Provide premium service. Have a full arena that looks good on television, even if it's not as big as some others might be.

Some of the newer tracks on the Sprint Cup circuit, places like Kansas and Chicagoland and Homestead-Miami, have more or less followed that model. But for how much longer? If Kansas or Chicagoland keep selling out, will parent company ISC resist the temptation to build more and more seats, until the facility reaches that unseen tipping point that becomes more than the market will bear? After all, when it was opened in 1997, the track formerly known as California Speedway started out with 71,000 seats, one race, an annual full house and plenty of good feeling. Now it has 92,000 seats, two races, and more tickets than it can sell. There's no more vivid example of how drastically things can change.

From a racetrack perspective, seats are revenue. Although tracks host a multitude of smaller events all throughout the calendar year -- car shows, driving schools, corporate gatherings, open-wheel races -- those one or two annual Sprint Cup weekends are where they really make their money. The fewer seats they have to sell, the less money they stand to make. In the go-go days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when burgeoning NASCAR was buoyed by its first national television contract, every track operator wanted a big, wide 1.5-mile tri-oval wrapped by 130,000 seats. So what if the national trend was to smaller, more intimate sports arenas? If you only had two chances a year to hit it, you had to hit it big.

That's all quite understandable. So is the belief that NASCAR tracks need a lot of seats to accommodate the wide variety of fans that come to races -- the man who owns the plant and the man who works there, in the words of legendary race promoter Humpy Wheeler. But now a lot of those seats are empty, and they look like so much unsold merchandise at the back of a car dealership, and they're sullying the reputation of an entire series that's healthier than they'd lead you to believe. Just think: If no racetrack on the Sprint Cup tour seated more than 100,000 people -- still 10,000 more than the biggest NFL stadium, FedEx Field in Washington, can hold -- this conversation wouldn't even be taking place.

Of course, that's not the case. The big question is whether the fans from all those boom years, the folks who nearly filled places like Charlotte and California and Michigan, will ever come back. It's hard to say. Maybe that was a spike, and the true attendance numbers -- which aren't necessarily bad ones -- are on either side. But NASCAR has always set the bar at sellouts, wanting that "mega-event" that delivers such a strong presence both live and on television. How do these overbuilt tracks achieve that? By working harder and finding more creative ways to sell grandstand seats. Or, if that fails, by knocking a few of them down.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer