How dense did this guy think they were? The nerve, claiming that Bristol Motor Speedway had tickets available. Didn't he know that Bristol tickets were among the hardest to find in all of sports, fought over in divorces, passed down from one generation to the next? Wasn't he aware that the short track had been sold out for 53 consecutive events? Please.

In East Tennessee, there are a few certainties -- haze will hang over the Great Smoky Mountains, the Volunteers will run through the T on home Saturdays in Neyland Stadium, and Bristol will be a lock-solid full house. The idea of actually being able to call the ticket office and buy a seat over the phone? Pure fantasy. Everybody in the Tri-Cities knew that.

Welcome to Bristol's quandary. Indeed, because of the ongoing economic recession, the half-mile facility is selling tickets to the general public for the first time since Speedway Motorsports Inc. purchased the track in 1996. Of course, that general public has understandably been a touch skeptical, given Bristol's deserved reputation for sellouts.

When the track first announced in late December that seats were available, locals and longtime race fans were left doing double-takes. Tickets? At Bristol? Can that be right? No wonder the toughest ticket in NASCAR suddenly felt like the toughest ticket to sell.

"We hadn't had any Cup product available for 13 years, so it was really hard to communicate the fact that we had tickets," said Jeff Byrd, the speedway's president and general manager. "You'd run into somebody and you'd say, 'Well, if you call, you can get a ticket.' They'd say, 'Nah, you're lying. I can't do that.' They didn't believe we had tickets. So we had to overcome that."

Even Bristol, as sure a thing as there is in all of NASCAR, has not been left untouched by a recession that's resulted in hundreds of race team employees being put out of work and thousands of race tickets going unsold. Bristol has sold out every Cup-level event it's hosted since Darrell Waltrip edged Bobby Allison to win the Busch 500 in August 1982. The track had only about 30,000 seats then. It has 160,000 now. So Byrd is doing something he's never done before -- advertising tickets for a Cup Series event, in the hopes of extending his facility's sellout streak to 54 races in Sunday's Food City 500. (Continued)