For some NASCAR tracks, bigger doesn't mean better

If you were building it from scratch, the perfect NASCAR racetrack would have Richmond's length and Darlington's shape. It would have Phoenix's hillside and Watkins Glen's blue guardrails and Martinsville's curb. It would have Daytona's spacious garage area and Pocono's half-mile-long bathroom and Indianapolis' canyon of a frontstretch. It would have the theatrical aura of Bristol, the frontier bravado of Texas, and the showgirl panache of Las Vegas. It would have New Hampshire's free parking, Talladega's sprawling campground, and Homestead's glorious, palm-fringed tropical backdrop.

And it would have 80,000 seats.

Why? Because the mega-racetrack, that facility with 160,000 or 170,000 seats, is fast becoming a dinosaur. We saw more evidence of that Saturday in the Bank of America 500, when Lowe's Motor Speedway had plenty of good seats still available. Just like there were plenty of good seats available for recent Sprint Cup races at California and Dover and Talladega. Just like there almost certainly will be good seats still available for upcoming events at Atlanta and Texas. No question, the spiraling economy is having an impact -- it's hard to sell tickets when prospective buyers are worried about their mortgages or their 401(k)s. But in all honestly, things have been trending this way for a while. Remember, it was an effort to sell more tickets that led the 165,000-seat Charlotte track to move its annual fall race from Sunday afternoon to Saturday night, and that was all the way back in 2003.

Now, that bubble has burst. The build-build-build days when NASCAR racetracks expanded exponentially with the sport's popularity are clearly over, leaving some facilities with an embarrassing lack of sold seats on event weekends. NASCAR itself is still going strong, still pulling very good television ratings, still drawing live crowds that would swamp most other events. According to NASCAR, the average attendance per race is still around 120,000. But it's easy to see how the average viewer watching from home would draw certain conclusions about the sport's heath by seeing an aerial shot of a big racetrack with only three-quarters of its seats full.

Gone are the days when a place like Dover can add seats every year for 16 consecutive years, ballooning from 22,000 to 135,000 in the process. Gone are the days when 112,000-seat Richmond can count on a sellout before its event weekend begins. Gone are the days when Daytona has takers for its backstretch grandstand for its July race. Gone are the days when, from a seating capacity standpoint, bigger meant better. These days, the safest bets for a sellout are places like Darlington (62,000), Homestead-Miami (65,000), Chicagoland (75,000), and Kansas (81,000), tracks with grandstand numbers that seem relatively modest, but in reality would rival or exceed almost any major-college or professional football stadium in America. And it's been that way since long before the stock market went in the tank.

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