ATLANTA -- Signs at the city limits welcome visitors to the home of the 1995 World Series champions and the 1996 Olympic Games. Driving through town on the interstate, the brick façade of the baseball park and the marshmallow roof of the indoor football stadium are as easy to spot as the sparking gold dome atop the state capitol building.

The bustling, traffic-choked center of Atlanta is 30 miles away from Atlanta Motor Speedway, which plays host its long-awaited first night race on Sunday. But the real battle is here, right in the middle of downtown, and it promises to make the action on the track seem tame by comparison.

“

People are talking about it and getting excited, and you can just feel the momentum building. It's new, it's different, and we're looking at it like a new event, not like we've moved an event. This is like a new beginning.

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-- ED CLARK

Forget Jimmie Johnson verses Tony Stewart. Try Atlanta Motor Speedway versus Britney Spears, who is playing Philips Arena.

Or the track versus the playoff-contending Atlanta Braves, at home against the Cincinnati Reds.

Or the speedway versus Georgia Tech, which opens its football season against Jacksonville State.

Or AMS versus a kickoff game between nationally-ranked Alabama and Virginia Tech at the Georgia Dome.

Or the track versus a beer festival in Smyrna, a Caribbean festival in Decatur, and a science fiction convention downtown that's so big even geek icons William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are scheduled to appear.

Welcome to Labor Day weekend in Atlanta. Welcome to any weekend in Atlanta, a city that during the past 15 years has turned itself into a mecca for major events, and features entertainment listings more crowded than I-75/85 at rush hour.

No wonder the speedway, located down the road in Hampton, has struggled to sell tickets in recent years. In such an environment, in a metro area now home to more than 5 million people, it can be difficult for a race track even with 124,000 seats and two Sprint Cup dates to stand out.

"You think, you've got all these people here, it should be easier to fill the place up," Ed Clark, president of the Atlanta track, said from his office overlooking Turn 4. "But it's hard, especially when what we call the circus comes to town two weekends a year, and then they're gone somewhere else the rest of the time. It's hard to create that awareness just among the general population.

"We think everybody knows about us. Then you go downtown and stand on a street corner and ask people about the race, and maybe one in 10 can tell you something about it. Then you realize, we're not doing quite as good as we think we are."

The track has a lot going for it, from its first-class amenities to its high speeds to its habit for producing thrilling finishes. But it has a lot going against it, too.

There's the reputation it's had through the years as a magnet for bad traffic and bad weather, even though the former has largely been alleviated through new road construction, and the latter hasn't been an issue on race day in more than three years.

There's the track's position on the less populated, less affluent south side of metro Atlanta, an area as foreign to some locals as the face of the moon.

There's the city's somewhat transient population, a result of the substantial corporate presence in Atlanta, but something that's also earned it a label as a bad sports town.

And then there's the clutter -- four professional sports franchises, a major college athletic program, a prominent year-end golf tournament, annual events like the Southeastern Conference football championship, the occasional Super Bowl or Final Four, a dizzying array of concert and convention venues, and the race track, all vying for the same eyeballs and disposable dollars.

Although Atlanta Motor Speedway sells about 30 percent of its tickets in metro Atlanta, the track struggles to gain ground in the city itself, where the ethnic population is highest and the competition among entertainment options is at its zenith. No wonder Clark occasionally consults with Gillian Zucker, president of Auto Club Speedway of Southern California, whose Los Angeles-area facility shares many of the same challenges that confront Atlanta.

In that kind of market, it takes something new and different to attract attention. Clark thinks he's got it in Sunday's Labor Day weekend race, which moved from California after a run defined by stifling heat and less-than-sellout crowds.

A night race, Clark said, is something race fans in Atlanta have been clamoring for. A return of NASCAR's Labor Day weekend event to the South may help assuage some of the bitterness among purists, still angry the race left Darlington to begin with. The pieces are in place for an event that promises to revitalize one of the sport's more historic tracks.

But in a place like Atlanta, will it be enough?

"It's one of the toughest tracks to sell tickets to that there is," said racing consultant Humpy Wheeler, former president of Speedway Motorsports Inc., the company that owns the Atlanta facility. "It's kind of like a dry Los Angeles. They don't have a beach to contend with, but they have a tremendous amount of things to do.

"I can remember being in Atlanta a number of years ago, and the Hawks were playing, and Carlos Santana was having a concert, and they had a world premier of a movie at the Fox theatre, and another sports event I can't remember all going on all on the same night. That's like being in Los Angeles or New York City. You just have an awful lot of things going on."

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The Braves remain a top draw in Atlanta -- but even they have trouble filling the seats.

The rub

Gary Stokan knows the perception is out there. He knows that eyebrows were raised at the sight of empty seats at Turner Field in the Braves' most recent playoff appearances. The knows the criticism Atlanta takes for the somewhat bandwagon nature of its sports fans. He knows the speedway isn't the only Atlanta sports facility to have a tough time selling tickets. He knows that around the country, when talk turns to the worst sports cities in America, that Atlanta typically ranks high on the list.

As president of the Atlanta Sports Council, it's Stokan's job to change that perception.

"I think you have to take everything into context. And when you talk about a bad sports city, there's not another city in America that has successfully hosted with sold-out events, the amount of mega-events we've had since 2000," he said. "We've had PGA Championships, two Final Fours, a women's Final Four, Super Bowls, Major League Baseball All-Star game, NHL All-Star game, NBA All-Star game, and that doesn't even count the NASCAR races, the Chick-fil-A Bowls, the SEC football championships, the ACC and SEC basketball tournaments. All of those have either sold out or set records in attendance.

"So I contend that Atlanta is a great sports town. It's the sports capital of the world in our hosting ability."

No question, Atlanta has carved a niche for itself alongside Miami and New Orleans as one of America's premier destinations for major events. And yet, when it comes to the hometown franchises that comprise much of Atlanta's sports identity, there are clearly some issues.

The speedway's battles to sell tickets, especially within the I-285 beltway that surrounds the inner city, are well known. Last season, despite a playoff appearance, the Falcons ranked 25th among 32 NFL teams in terms of average home attendance. The Hawks, who also made the playoffs, ranked 20th among 30 NBA teams. The Thrashers, who failed to make the postseason, ranked 29th among 30 teams in the NHL. The only Atlanta team to rank in the top half of its league in average home attendance was the Braves, who ranked 14th among 30 Major League Baseball teams last season, and as of last week were in the same position this year.

That brings us back to the city's cluttered entertainment market.

"When you have 81 Braves games and 41 Hawks and 41 Thrashers games, it gets a little bit more difficult to sell those out, because there is so much more to do," Stokan said. And Tracy White, vice president of sales and marketing for the Hawks and Thrashers, points out that many Atlanta sports events do very well on television. NBA broadcasts traditionally draw strong ratings in the Atlanta area, and the city's spring NASCAR race stands as the fourth-highest-rated event nationally of this season.

"I don't think it's fair at all to say that Atlanta is a bad sports town," White said. "I think Atlanta is a good sports town. It's a very competitive sports town. It's a very competitive landscape. What the city of Atlanta has shown is, they love a winner. If you put a winning product on the court, the ice, the field, you get pretty good support from the fan base.

"One thing that makes Atlanta a great place to live and work and play in is the quality of life. The climate is such that people participate in a lot of outdoor activities. There are a lot of things you're competing against, not just on a normal sports and entertainment level, but in a lot of cases, you're competing with the overall quality of life. That may not always result in as many people inside your arenas or stadium as you like, but there are still people watching you."

Still, perception often colors reality. One sports wagering Web site, citing "completely unenthused fans," ranked Atlanta as the worst sports city in America in 2006. When Forbes published its list of "most miserable" sports cities in America in 2008 -- a tally that had as much to do with on-field futility as anything else -- Atlanta again topped the list. Against that kind of mindset, good television ratings help only so much.

"I think some if it is legitimate. I meet people all the time who say, 'I watch all sports on TV, I just don't go to events,' " Clark said. "Obviously, when you look at the Braves and you're in the playoffs and you don't sell out, people in other markets are like, 'You've got to be kidding me.' I think that just makes it a bigger challenge to be fresh, new, exciting.

"Yes, it's a race, but what else are you going to give me besides the race? Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. Sometimes it has to do with what else is going on in the market around you. But we all feel that."

The root of the issue may be that Atlanta's sports market is a tough one to pin down. The area has a massive corporate presence -- Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, Delta Air Lines, Georgia-Pacific, NAPA, Newell Rubbermaid, CNN, and Lockheed Martin are just a few of the many companies that call Atlanta home. Given the heavy corporate interest in NASCAR, that's often a boon to the race track's hospitality business.

It also means that many of the people who live in Atlanta are not from Atlanta. Between 2000 and 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, no metro area in America added more new residents than Atlanta. And a lot of them hold allegiances not to Atlanta sports franchises, but the ones they left back home.

"It's a city where people go and live five or seven years before moving somewhere else as they climb the corporate ladder," said Wheeler, who founded the consulting firm The Wheeler Company after his split from SMI. That transience is a fact everyone is aware of -- when the Thrashers franchise was founded in 1999, White said, marketers went after hockey fans regardless of allegiance, knowing they'd come to root for the opponent, but hoping they'd eventually come to see the home team. The organization continues to place an emphasis on clinics and other activities to win over kids, hoping they will rub off on their parents.

Over at the speedway, the transient nature of Atlanta's population is seen as another challenge that the city presents.

"We talk about that inside I-285 area, I think that's probably a lot of who those people are," Clark said. "But you can't use that as an excuse. If somebody's never been to a stock-car race, you need to get them to one so they can be exposed to it. Or at least, build some kind of level of awareness. They're doing something. They're not staying home, just because they moved here from somewhere else.

"It might make it a little bit more of a challenge. But I think at a time when the majority of the drivers were from the Southeast, if a guy moved here from Michigan, he didn't have a link. But now you've got [Matt] Kenseth and [Brad] Keselowski. You've got some kind of link to people from that area. It's just a matter of finding it to get them down here."

One of those transplants is Stokan, who grew up in Pittsburgh. In order to attract new residents, he said, Atlanta franchises have to win. But what about entities like the speedway, which has only two opportunities each season to get people through the turnstiles, and has to do so long before a winner is crowned in Victory Lane? Then it's a matter of putting on the kind of event that demands attention, which the speedway is trying to do with its inaugural night race.

"That's a unique challenge in that you don't have multiple games or you don't have a franchise people can follow day-to-day," Stokan said. "You're bringing in a one-time event. The great thing about Atlanta is, there is a good sports fan base there, and people do like coming to a big-time event.

"You have to put together the ancillary events around the big event. You have to make sure the facility you're at is one of the best, which is certainly the case with Atlanta Motor Speedway, one of the best facilities in the country to go see a NASCAR race. Ed Clark and his team will put on a great production all weekend there. I think the key is, moving it to a date that really works for the fan. And in this case, Labor Day is going to be an absolute home run for Atlanta Motor Speedway and all its fans."

Atlanta Motor Speedway is a fast, wide track that drivers openly speak highly of and look forward to competing on.

The sell

Clark calls it "selling in atypical ways." If an organization needs a venue in which to host a charity event, the Atlanta Motor Speedway president will suggest the race track. The speedway works with a group that puts on driving clinics for high school students trying to get their driver's licenses. It's all designed to get people out to the race track, which despite its rural surroundings has some of the more impressive facilities in all of NASCAR. Once there, Clark hopes, they'll want to see the place full for an event weekend.

"You know, I love to see people come here for the first time and go 'Holy smokes, I had no idea.' I like it and I don't like it," Clark said. "I like it because they're impressed, and I don't like it because they didn't have any idea it was like this."

Selling in Atlanta, where the weekly events guide can be as thick as a small-town phone book and some residents rarely venture south of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, takes a strategic approach. For its inaugural night race this Labor Day weekend, the speedway's marketing team is placing an emphasis on two areas -- national and local.

Atlanta used to take a more regional approach to marketing its NASCAR races, viewing its target audience as anywhere between Nashville and Orlando, and indeed many of its fans still come from the I-75 corridor. But these days, with many people suffering financially because of the down economy, Clark realizes that some people will be hesitant to venture too far from home.

Given that the race is on a holiday weekend and fans will have an extra day to travel, Atlanta has been running ads on SPEED and in USA Today -- using specific phone numbers so marketers can track their effectiveness -- to try to lure those fans willing to drive several hours to attend a NASCAR event. But with many still caught in the grip of the recession, the speedway is leaning heavily on locals.

Driving around downtown, billboards advertising the track's ticket specials are easy to find. On local sports-talk radio, there's even an advertisement for the race tailored specifically to Braves fans. The track is marketing the Labor Day weekend race as a new event, and using it to try and create a larger footprint within its hometown.

"In his economy we're in, people are staying close to home. We hear that all the time," Clark said. "What do they call them, staycations? We want to get our chunk of that. That's why were spending so many dollars close to home. So it's either nationally, or close to home where we've grown our advertising for this race."

Like many sports franchises, the speedway can break its ticket sales down by ZIP code, which helps marketers determine where fans are more likely to be, and plan their advertising buys accordingly. But strangely enough, cutting through Atlanta's cluttered entertainment market often means teaming up with the competition.

For its former October date, the speedway would often cross-promote with the Thrashers, who usually had a home game during race weekend. At recent monster truck and motocross shows, the track placed a flyer advertising ticket prices and the pre-race Diamond Rio concert in each cup holder. On a recent weekend track staff worked three non-racing events, including a concert at Lakewood Amphitheatre. They'll bring over the pace car, set up a tent, and hand out materials to whoever will take them.

"I just think it's a time you've got to get out and do old grassroots stuff, do old down-and-dirty, put-something-in-their-hand marketing," Clark said. "I can tell you, whatever we do, it's not for a lack of effort. ... Nobody's going let you come to their place and promote if you don't ask them. We make sure we ask everybody, and if 70 percent say OK, that's 70 percent. It's just about getting in front of people."

Cross-promotion in Atlanta is easier than it used to be -- there was once a time, Clark said, when a venue like the amphitheatre would have demanded several thousand dollars to let speedway staff market at their event. Now? "We all need each other," Clark said. In fact, staff from the amphitheatre will be at the race on Sunday to promote its upcoming Toby Keith and Trace Adkins concert.

The speedway is also marketing to fans of the Alabama and Virginia Tech football teams, which will play the kickoff game the night before the Sprint Cup race. There's even some talk of showing the start of Saturday's Nationwide race on the big screen at the Georgia Dome before the football game, and showing the end of the kickoff game on the big screen at the race track after the Nationwide event ends.

"Rising tides raise all boats," said Stokan, president of the Sports Council, which is putting on the kickoff game. "If you look at the demographics, some of the Alabama fans will have to go right by Atlanta Motor Speedway going home.

"We think there are a lot of cross-promotional opportunities. We think the college football fan demographic and the NASCAR fan demographic do overlap. And so I think it makes a great deal of sense to cross-promote each other. And certainly we're all in Atlanta to help each other."

Plus, according to White of the Hawks and Thrashers, the tactic is effective. "We all tend to find that sports fans are sports fans, entertainment seekers are entertainment seekers, and if they enjoy attending an event in one location, you probably have a pretty good chance of getting those folks who like sports and entertainment to come enjoy an event in your facility, more so than marketing just to the general mass market of folks in the city," he said.

"Our demographic profile is certainly unique for all of our sports, but there's a lot of crossover in that people who are attending those races or those events are fans of sports or entertainment. We feel like cross-marketing makes a lot of sense with all entities."

But there's another segment of fans Atlanta Motor Speedway has pursued in the run-up to this Labor Day weekend race, a segment that no amount of cross-promotion will sway. These aren't casual sports fans who tend to overlook the race track in the clutter of entertainment options available in the city. These aren't inside-the-perimeter dwellers who rarely venture south of downtown. These are hardcore, longtime race fans, the kind you'd think Atlanta would attract in droves. But they're angry and bitter about what they see as the de-Southernization of NASCAR racing. Labor Day, for half a century an institution at Darlington Raceway, was their high holy day. For many of them, the shifting of that race weekend to Southern California was tantamount to betrayal.

Now it's back -- not at Darlington, but at another traditional Southern venue not too far away. Will that be enough to lure those embittered diehards back to the fold? The long-term success of Atlanta's new race weekend may hinge on the answer.

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Sunday at Atlanta, Labor Day weekend racing returns to the South for the first time since 2003, when Terry Labonte won the Southern 500 at Darlingon.

The hope

For race track presidents, complaints are nothing new. Like every track, Atlanta Motor Speedway receives its share of letters or e-mails from unhappy fans. Ed Clark tries to make sure all of them are answered by him or a member of his staff. If the complaint is particularly virulent, Clark will get a phone number from the ticket office, and call the letter-writer one evening at home.

So he's used to dealing with grievances of any nature. But one day he received a letter that left him puzzled and concerned. It was from a fan who wanted to know why Atlanta was taking Labor Day weekend away from Darlington.

"I wrote him back [and said], 'Listen, we didn't take anything. They asked us to take this. We thought it was good for us, we thought it was good for fans in the South,' " Clark said. "But we didn't do it to take it away from them. It was already taken away from them. I was kind of caught off guard by his tone."

It was just a glimpse at the anger and distrust borne by many longtime, traditional fans of the sport, who saw races taken from places like Darlington, Rockingham, and North Wilkesboro to feed newer facilities in newer markets. One of those moves involved the Labor Day weekend date, a fixture in Darlington since the track's founding in 1950, that was shipped off to metro Los Angeles prior to the 2004 season.

In its new locale, the date never really caught on -- purists derided it, many locals were indifferent to it, and oppressive heat sometimes made it difficult just to stand outside at the Southern California track. So last year, a trade was offered: California's Labor Day weekend for Atlanta's Chase date, a switch that promised better weather and better crowds for all involved.

It took Clark, long a proponent of bringing a night race to Atlanta, about 15 seconds to say yes. In the time since, the track has openly celebrated the return of Labor Day racing back to its Southeastern roots, a tactic clearly aimed at fans turned off by some of the changes NASCAR has made in recent years. Despite its high speeds and modern amenities, Atlanta is very much a traditional track with a traditional fan base, so it's easy to connect some of the speedway's recent struggles at the ticket office to disillusionment -- not necessarily toward the race track, but the sport as a whole.

"I'm not making excuses, but I think we've been caught up a little bit, as have Charlotte and some other tracks, in the traditional longtime fan feeling that they've been abandoned," Clark said. "That's been more visible in the Southeast.

"A guy in Kansas City doesn't feel like he's abandoned, because he probably wasn't a fan to start with 30 years ago. Some people in Southeast, I'm amazed sometimes at the hard feelings they have, whether it's right or not. I don't necessarily agree that it's all correct, but perception is reality."

Humpy Wheeler sees it, too. The loss of race dates in the Southeast, he points out, should have increased demand for the events remaining in the region. Instead, the opposite has occurred.

"There is a significant disillusionment with the Southern race fan," Wheeler said. "With the closing of Wilkesboro, Rockingham, the loss of a date at Darlington, you would think that at Charlotte the October race would be sold out today. The exact opposite has happened. We've lost a tremendous amount of fans because they got mad because tracks were closed in those areas, and they've chosen not to go to races at all.

"Anything that we can do now to bring some nostalgia back is going to help significantly. The argument everybody makes is, we've created new fans in Texas and California and other places. But the tremendous core NASCAR group that existed in the South was greatly decimated in that period when these places were closed."

How do you win those people back? Much like a political party, it's all about keeping the base happy. Clark does what he can, like placing an emphasis on taking care of campers, who are more apt to be traditional fans who come to every race. He could alter his advertising strategy and try to sway more new fans, but he won't. It's not easy, but a focus of the track's marketing efforts is to bring the diehards back. "You can't forget that demographic that's always supported you, always been there for you, and continues to be," Clark said, "because they're going to come race after race. Other people may not be back for three years."

So far, the returns are promising. Camping sales, Clark said, are way up. Ticket sales are ahead of last year's pace by double-digit numbers. Earlier this month, the track was handing two and a half times the daily ticket volume that it was a season ago. If the economy were a little better, Clark would have hopes of a sellout. He'll have to settle for what could be the track's best crowd in years, and the knowledge that there's a buzz over racing in Atlanta again. Over at the Sports Council, even Stokan can sense it.

"Very much so," he said. "I think in the past, we went through a transition. We had the late race in November where the weather could have been nice, could have been dicey, could have been cold or rainy, you never were sure. Then we moved to October, and now we're moving to Labor Day. We had the transition of the Sprint Cup and how it was figured out. And even though we're not in the final races, I think night racing and Labor Day are going to be the formula to take that event to a whole new level.

"Being the first year, I think it will be successful. I think as we look back three or five years from now, we're going to think, gosh, why didn't we do that 20 years ago?"

But over at the speedway, past the big airport and down the Tara Highway and through little towns like Jonesboro and Fayetteville and Lovejoy, they're not thinking about 20 years from now. They're not thinking about next week. They're thinking about Sunday, and the effort it's taken to get there, and the promise it may hold.

"We've got a lot of tickets left to sell, I'm not going to fool you," Clark said. "But we're beating last year's numbers daily. People are talking about it and getting excited, and you can just feel the momentum building. It's new, it's different, and we're looking at it like a new event, not like we've moved an event. This is like a new beginning. I think it will be a good launching pad for us."