Empty Seats

 

 

 As many of you know, I write this blog mostly to try to help draw some attention to my home track, Senoia Raceway.

 For that reason, I try to keep this blog mostly on the positive side.

 But this past weekend, there was one aspect of the racing I followed that had me scratching my head, and worrying about the direction the sport of short-track racing seems to be headed.

 Through the week, I followed on social media the high-dollar dirt races at Bristol Motor Speedway. I was especially interested in keeping up with Jody Knowles, a frequent competitor at Senoia Raceway, who put on a Crate racing clinic at Bristol. He won two preliminary features and the main event on Saturday night.

 I was also glad to see Dale McDowell win the Super Late Model race, especially since I was there when he won a similar race at Bristol years ago.

 I always look at the background of photos and videos, trying to get an idea of the attendance. From what I could ascertain last week, the massive Bristol grandstands, that seat about 150,000, were mostly empty. There might have been 4,000 to 5,000 people there.

 Knowles said that for him there was still plenty to celebrate his wins, but it the post-race festivities were different.

 “It’s not like being on the frontstretch with fans 20 feet away,” he said.

 Social media was mostly silent about the absence of fans, until Kenny Wallace brought it up on Twitter and got the conversation going.

 The reasons given by Wallace’s followers for the slim crowd are predictable – high ticket prices (about $40 bucks at Bristol from what I was told), high gas prices, the ease of watching the races online, high concession prices, the quality of the racing.

 I worry that the pandemic may have permanently changed some fans’ habits. People have discovered that for a reasonably affordable price, you can watch dirt racing from the comfort of home.

 When I hear that I think about a conversation I had years ago with the late NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter.

 We were at Rockingham, one of my favorite tracks but one that for years had unfavorable race dates. One was usually in February, just after the Daytona 500, and the other was in late fall, when the entertainment competition from other sports and deer hunting was strong and when the weather could be awfully chilly.

 I expressed my thoughts that as good as the racing was at the Rock, it deserved a race date in warmer weather.

 Hunter countered that races at Rockingham made for good TV and gave NASCAR and the networks a good TV show to follow up on the Daytona 500.

 That was true, but look at Rockingham today.

 I worry that short-track promoters, lured by the broadcast revenues, will find themselves in the same boat as Rockingham – putting on great races too early or too late in the season to draw large on-site audiences.

 If made-for-TV races are the future of dirt-track racing, and it looks like they might be, I hope promoters find a way to capitalize on broadcasts of their local shows so they can keep enough revenue coming in to make a profit.

 Mostly I hope they step up their efforts to get folks to the track in person, which for my money is by far the best way to enjoy a race.

 Empty grandstands don’t make much of a backdrop.



Comments

  1. Bobby WApril 7, 2022 at 6:41 AM

    I think you are correct in your Blog. I think it is after affects of the pandemic also. The Cold Temps. Didn’t help at all. Great article as always my friend.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roby HelmApril 7, 2022 at 9:16 AM

    Short track racing has gotten away from "Old School" promoting to put butts in the stands. Putting up notices on Facebook for free is like preaching to the choir!! People choose to like or follow their page, and the folks that do that are already race fans and competitors. Short Track racing is not reaching out to potential new fans!!! Track owners have become back gate promoters because they try to sell enough pit passes to pay the purse. In order to that, they have to run eight or more Divisions, and race until 2 a.m. to complete a night of racing. The folks in the grandstand are rejecting this type of show. They want a four hour show!!! Short Track racing will not survive on pay-per-view TV. The production of these events is amateurish in some cases. It's hard to capture all of the action with one camera. As for Bristol, it is possible to put 45,000 in the seats for a dirt race. I helped do it in 2000 with Track Manager Jeff Byrd, and Mike Swims with the Hav-A-Tampa Dirt Late Model Series that brought 168 race cars!!! And we did it "Old School" without Social Media!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 8, 2022 at 5:17 AM

    On the Bristol deal. Why if your streaming is bringing in enough revenue reduce the grandstand ticket price to $20 then you would double the fans. Example a WoO LM show at Cherokee cost $35 and they fill the place up. It’s the same at Charlotte for the short track finals in the fall. Cut the ticket prices in half and fill the place

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Proud Daddy

Image
  In several conversations with Sonny Pollard since he and his family repurchased Senoia Raceway and began transforming it into one of dirt racing’s better facilities, he’s asked me: “Do you think my daddy would be proud?”  And my answer is always: “Yes.”  Hence Pollard died young and has been gone for years, but his influence on Georgia auto racing remains strong, and that’s a big reason he was recently elected as a member of the Class of 2023 of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame. He joins long-time Atlanta Motor Speedway president Ed Clark, Hall of Fame founder Gordon Pirkle and short-track asphalt racers Bob Leach and Sandy Goss.  On a personal note, it was Hence who helped start my career as a motorsports journalist by giving me a season pass when I was just a teenager. I tried to repay him by sending in results from the track to the old Atlanta radio stations WBIE and WPLO and to the Atlanta newspapers, and that eventually led to a career as a full-time write...
Read more

Things That Make You Say "Wow"

Image
 As I sit here on a rainy night in Georgia, I’m thinking about some things I’ve seen lately that have me saying “Wow!” to myself.  On a personal note, I recently received my red, white and blue Medicare card in the mail. Since I lost my health insurance along with my job at the big newspaper we’ve paid some really hefty premiums for some not-so-great coverage.  We even had some agents look at our medical history and tell us our best hope is to hurry up and turn 65.  I’m here now, and it feels pretty darn good.  On the racing front, I, like a million or more others, am still marveling at the way Ross Chastain rode the wall on the last lap at Martinsville Speedway to pass five drivers for position and claim a playoff berth.  I’ve had several drivers, good ones, tell me they’ve often wondered if that would work. Of course none of them ever tried it, which makes what Ross did even more impressive.  Just today, I saw something else on the racing...
Read more

The Rest Of The Story

Image
    It makes me feel really old to be writing about something that happened 50 years ago, but here goes anyway.  Back in 1973, I went to many a race with a group of men from my hometown of Inman and thereabouts. Most of them are gone now. My distant cousins, Wesley, Weldon and Ronnie Stubbs were regulars in our group, as were Freeman Clemons and Pete Gay.  Cecil Dunn went occasionally, and it’s refreshing that his memory of the things we saw back then matches up with mine. Cecil and I were standing next to the backstretch fence in 1975 when Tiny Lund was killed in a crash just in front of us. We also watched as two Georgia men, watching from the infield across from us, scaled the fence and rescued Terry Link from his burning car, even as a track worker was using his caution flag as a weapon to try to keep the two heroes away from Link’s car, which had impacted Lund’s. (Years later, thanks to a savvy researcher at the newspaper, I was able to interview Richard Sim...
Read more