For some tracks, two races aren't always better

Ed Clark called his staff together at 11:30 Thursday morning to deliver the news all of them had feared -- that beginning in 2011, Atlanta Motor Speedway was losing one of its two Sprint Cup events.

"There was a lot of sadness," said Clark, the track's president. "But looking beyond that, before we all left the room, we all committed to making Labor Day weekend big, and taking great care of our customers, and making that one weekend into the biggest sporting event in this state each year. Make it something race fans across the country want to come and be a part of. I was pleased to see them take it that way and be as positive as they could. I told them they could be disappointed for a couple of days, but we've got a race in 31 days, you've got a lot of work to do, a lot of folks coming in here to take care of, and we want to show them a great time. That kind of sums it up."

The move, ostensibly to provide a long-awaited Sprint Cup date to another Speedway Motorsports Inc. holding, Kentucky Speedway, was hardly a shock given the weather and attendance issues that had long dogged Atlanta's traditional March event. It's also part of a significant schedule overhaul that could impact many other tracks -- Kansas, Fontana, Texas, Chicagoland and New Hampshire likely among them -- and should begin to come into focus next week. Meanwhile, Atlanta is left with a Labor Day weekend night race that last season generated a great deal of excitement and interest, and attracted the facility's largest crowd in years.

The second edition of that Sept. 5 event now looms in less than a month, giving Clark and his staff little time to mope. Still, the news that the March race was moving elsewhere hit hard. Atlanta's attendance issues belie the track's position as a stalwart on the NASCAR calendar for 50 years, and a favorite of the many sponsors that call the city home. Clark himself didn't know about the impending move until two days before it was made public, and like many had heard speculation that quibbles between SMI chairman Bruton Smith and local police in New Hampshire made that track more vulnerable.

As it turned out, Atlanta was in the realignment crosshairs. Clark closed his Thursday meeting by asking his staff to try and get past the hurt, and work on building the Labor Day weekend race into a signature event for both the facility and the sport.

"When we concluded, we kind of said, OK, we want everybody to buy in," Clark recalled. "We're going to make Labor Day special and take care of the people and show them good customer service. To a person, they said yes. We're a team here, and we're going to do this. There is a sting, no doubt about it. But we have a lot to do going forward. We'll get over that quickly. We're pretty resilient. We'll bounce back, move on and go to work. That's a good way to put it behind us."

That's almost certainly what will happen. No question, losing a race weekend is a severe blow to a track's pride, especially at a facility that's hosted two annual events on NASCAR's premier circuit since it opened in 1960. Nobody wants it to happen to them. There's a stigma associated with losing a race, one that carries with it a suggestion of failure. Tracks that have two Sprint Cup races are automatically assumed to be more successful than tracks that have one. Given the economic realities surrounding today's NASCAR, that's antiquated thinking. The idea that hosting two annual races serves as some kind of barometer of achievement needs to be revamped as badly as the schedule.

It's difficult to see it now, through the disappointment of race fans voting with their wallets and letting another race date at another traditional Southern track get away, but this could be the best thing to happen to Atlanta since Smith bought the place in 1990 and transformed it from a muddy outpost into a modern sports facility. It's plainly evident in crowd numbers that some tracks, for whatever reason, cannot support two dates. That's not a crime. In many cases, the factors driving that inattention are completely beyond the track's control. Atlanta has fought that battle for a long time, dealing with a home market infamous for sports apathy long before the current recession.

Take away a race date, though, and suddenly there's ticket demand. There's more of an urgency for potential spectators to buy sooner, because they don't have a second race on which to fall back. All your marketing and advertising is concentrated on one weekend rather than split between two. In theory, there's a better crowd that looks great on television and infuses everyone with a sense of accomplishment. No track exemplifies that better than Darlington Raceway, which had two races for most of its long existence, but struggled so mightily at the gate in the 1990s there were real worries that the whole place, and not just a single race date, would soon be lost. (Continued)