Is Atlanta the next track to pay price of indifference? (cont'd)

You'd think they'd be unfurling banners and signing petitions and staging sit-ins, anything to convince the powers-that-be at NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports Inc. that two annual events in Atlanta are an absolute necessity. Now granted, nobody's publicly put the place on notice, and the switch to Labor Day shows how serious everyone is about making it work there. But it still comes down to selling tickets. And as recent history has shown us, the ticket-buying public -- or, more accurately, the public that doesn't buy tickets -- can be a fickle, perfidious crowd.

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Just ask the folks at what used to be called North Carolina Speedway. Every year the e-mails pour in from people who lament the demise of the Rock, a great race track with above-average facilities that hosted the Cup Series from 1965 until it was dropped from the schedule in 2004. They blame NASCAR, they blame progress, they blame Francis Ferko, they blame sponsors, they blame Kansas and Chicagoland and Homestead-Miami. They blame everybody but the one group that truly killed North Carolina Speedway -- themselves. No question, big corporate sponsors had little use for a rural facility out in the piney woods. No question, the venue was overbuilt for its market size. But had fans packed the house twice a year, it would have been much more difficult to justify pawning the place off to settle a lawsuit. Instead, middling attendance made it expendable. In those final years, when it became clear the facility's survival was at stake, track management and the leadership of Richmond County practically begged people to come out. Not enough did.

That kind of disinterest carries dire consequences. The same thing happened at Darlington Raceway, which lost one of its two annual race weekends solely because it couldn't sell enough seats. People wail and gnash teeth over the loss of the original Southern 500, NASCAR's first event on a paved track when it debuted in 1950, and run for the final time in 2004 before the date was shipped out to Phoenix. But if the track -- whose seating capacity is among the smallest on the Sprint Cup tour -- hadn't gone six years without a sellout crowd, who knows what might have happened. Now, Darlington has swung in the opposite direction, and its string of four consecutive sellouts had led parent company International Speedway Corp. to sink millions of capital improvement dollars into the South Carolina facility, all but ensuring its place on the schedule going forward.

That's what the power of a sellout can do. Nobody realistically expects a sellout this weekend in Atlanta -- the place has 124,000 seats, after all, and disposable dollars can be tough to come by at a time when so many people are more concerned with foreclosure and unemployment rates. Likewise, no track's future should be decided in the midst of a recession. But there will be a day when the economy comes back to life, and more people have money to buy race tickets, and sellouts once again become the standard for NASCAR race tracks. When that day comes, there's only one way for people to make the statement that they still want two annual races at a traditional track like Atlanta -- by showing up.

The so-called traditionalists have quite a voice in this sport, and they should. Their passion is legendary, as is their resistance to change. They form a natural check and balance against the forces that have pushed NASCAR forward so rapidly, some of its roots were ripped from the ground. They're the reason chairman Brian France went "back to basics," holding the line on change since the beginning of last year.

But the constant complaining, the relentless railing against modern NASCAR and its hierarchy, gets old. At some point, those words need to be put into action. They had the power to save Rockingham, to rescue the original Southern 500, but they didn't. They allowed those events to wither and die from indifference, and the regret spills forth in the form of emotional e-mails every time those old race weekends roll around. Now, they and they alone will determine the fate of two races at Atlanta. Traditionalists as a rule are quite fond of the past. We can only hope they've learned from it.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.