Is Bruton's big TV sign of progress, or opposite?

What do we call it? SmithVision? BrutonTV? Certainly it requires a name commensurate with its size, given that the high-definition big-screen that Bruton Smith plans to build along the backstretch at Charlotte Motor Speedway will be among the largest in the world. At 200 feet wide and 80 feet tall, it will rival -- or exceed, according to Smith -- even the big board hanging from the roof of the Dallas Cowboys' football stadium, which is so huge that punted balls sometimes strike it by accident.

The enormous screen will be built by Panasonic, cost tens of millions of dollars, and should be ready to go by next season's Coca-Cola 600. Smith envisions the big TV as a way to entice other, non-racing events to the 1.5-mile oval, but its primary purpose will be to sell tickets to NASCAR races. Bruton is so bullish on the lure of high definition electronics, he believes his pricey new gadget will help the track sell out its 140,000 seats, something that hasn't occurred in some time.

Give the man credit -- as polarizing as Smith can be, as much as he may still be cursed in some parts of Wilkes County, N.C., nobody seems more willing to pull out a checkbook and upgrade a facility. After he bought Atlanta, he turned a near-bankrupt track with wooden bleachers and seating on a dirt hilltop into a palace of modern racing. He changed Bristol from an overlooked short track into the sport's premier showcase. He's added condo towers and swanky suite areas. He doesn't do anything halfway. When he needed to expand Bristol, he blew the top off a mountain. When he built a drag strip, he installed four lanes rather than two. At Kentucky, he says he's going from 66,000 seats right to 100,000.

And now there's the replay board at Charlotte, which will be roughly the size of a regulation North American hockey rink. "We wanted to do something very big here," Smith said when the project was unveiled Tuesday at the speedway, and indeed he is. When they flip the switch on this thing next May, it's going to be grand, it's going to be brilliant -- and it's going to make NASCAR fans realize what they've been missing all along.

From the perspective of a motorsports venue, a dedicated HD replay screen of this size is unquestionably progress. But from a general sports point of view, this idea is oh so 2005. By now, other major sports venues are stocked with a variety of replay boards that make fans ohhh and ahhh as much as the live action does. In the NFL in particular, big replay screens (most of them HD) are becoming more and more the standard -- there's the one in Dallas, of course, but others in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Denver, and Seattle, to name a few. The Sprint Vision boards that NASCAR fans have had to look at come across as grainy, rabbit-eared Philcos by comparison.

So yes, Smith's planned big screen is a great leap forward for a NASCAR track, but at the same time an indication of how speedways have often lagged behind venues in other sports in terms of fan amenities. Now, race fans can be a hardy bunch, and they're proud of that fact. They'll spend a three-day weekend sleeping in a tent or the bed of a pickup truck, they'll wait in line for a shower, they'll subsist on beer and whatever they can cook over a camp stove, and they'll love every minute of it. They'll sit up in the grandstands through rain, heat or cold, all to see their favorite drivers compete. Bless them. There's something very salt-of-the-earth, very everyman, very NASCAR, about that scene.

But it's also a stark exception in a wider sports world where a ticket often entitles a spectator to a comfortable, molded seat with a back and a cup holder, a big high-definition replay board, televisions in the concourse and concession areas, and other amenities that many NASCAR tracks simply cannot deliver. Granted, they're not exactly competing on level playing fields -- race tracks are massive facilities designed to accommodate many more spectators, they're most often built without the public funds typically lavished upon NFL or Major League Baseball stadiums, and in many cases they're much older venues that would have to be gutted or extensively renovated to bring them up to the standards of venues in other major sports.

Take the case of Dover International Speedway, which hosts the Cup Series on Sunday. The Monster Mile has 135,000 seats, most of which are aluminum bleachers. It was built in 1969, two years before the construction of another major sports venue up the road in Philadelphia. That facility, Veterans Stadium, was considered so inadequate by 2003 that it was demolished. And Dover isn't the only track on the Cup tour that, if it hosted any other major sport, would have both fans and franchise tenants clamoring for an upgrade or a move to a more modern facility.

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Still, this is a difficult situation for NASCAR tracks, which generate the bulk of their revenue not from a full slate of baseball or football home games, but one or two races a season. It can be tough to justify spending millions of dollars in capital improvement money on amenities that will sit unused for 50 weeks a year. And yet, given how challenging it can be to sell tickets in today's economy, maybe Smith has the right idea. Maybe it's time to stop glamorizing the whole concept of roughing it, and start providing race fans with the kinds of amenities NFL spectators have enjoyed for years. Maybe it's time to upgrade the fan experience in NASCAR to the point where the arena is an attraction in and of itself, something only very few speedways -- such as Daytona, Indianapolis, Bristol, and Las Vegas -- can claim.

To be fair, some tracks have made great strides. The garages at Las Vegas and Daytona, with their raised viewing decks, are the envy of the sport. Charlotte and Talladega are among those that have replaced a number of narrow, older seats with wider, more comfortable ones. With the addition of its newest grandstand in 2006, all of the seats at little old Darlington became chair-backed. While concessions at some tracks have a long way to go beyond fatty burgers and hot dogs, others have upgraded the available fare. And now there's Bruton's big HD TV, which is overdue at a venue as large as a race track, and if it truly increases ticket sales -- and conceivably sponsor value, since the track will have control of the content -- could very well revolutionize the sport.

For that, though, we'll have to wait until next spring. For now, those Sprint Vision screens will have to do.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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