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Bruton Smith blew into the media
center last Friday at Atlanta Motor
Speedway and held court with reporters
for quite a while. The military would call
this a diversionary tactic.
I drifted in and out of the
gaggle, making sure I wasn't
missing Smith plowing any
new ground. He talked about
how NASCAR should take
the final race of the Sprint
Cup season away from
Homestead - or, as he likes
to call it, Homeinstead - and
move it back to Atlanta or out
to Las Vegas. He talked about
how the Cup banquet should
be in Las Vegas and not New York. He
talked about a lot of stuff.
I didn't write about any of it (until
now, I guess) because it wasn't anything
I hadn't heard before and because I had
a good idea what he was up to.
For weeks leading up to Sunday's
Kobalt Tools 500, there had been whispers
all around the sport about how few
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tickets had been sold for the race at the
1.54-mile track located
south of downtown
Atlanta. The weather was
perfect and there was a
huge walk-up crowd
(when compared with
other years), and they still
might have sold half the
seats.
If Atlanta Motor
Speedway had 75,000 or
so, which is where I would
put the crowd I saw
(NASCAR's estimate of 94,000 on the
official race report was way high), that's
still more fans than there would be at a
sold-out Homstead-Miami Speedway.
It's about what California had, maybe a
little less, and about what places like
Kansas and Chicagoland will hold later
this year.
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I say that people who see the stands
half-empty at Atlanta and think the
crowd is "terrible" need to keep in perspective
that 75,000 for any professional
sports event in the Atlanta market is not
shabby. But it's not good, either.
Smith keeps insisting that the track
will sell out its second date this year,
which moves to Sunday night of Labor
Day weekend. People at the track say
they're encouraged by the response to
that new date, moved back from around
Halloween weekend in previous years.
We'll see.
This ain't Bruton Smith's first rodeo.
By chumming the waters with talk about
how NASCAR ought to do this and that
with other races at other places he got
some of the heat off of his track at
Atlanta, at least for a little while, over
the weekend. But he's smart enough to
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know that nobody's going to have their
attention fully diverted from how many
seats went unsold Sunday - at least not
for long.
Smith would like to have a second
race in Las Vegas, and he's promised up
and down that he'll bring Cup racing to
the track he bought in Kentucky last
year. He might be singing the song that
one of those dates "should" come from
one of International Speedway Corp.'s
tracks, but he knows as well as I do
that's not going to happen.
If Kentucky gets a date next year,
Smith will put it there from within the
Speedway Motorsports portfolio. And
after seeing the crowd Sunday at Atlanta,
that track has a great big target locked
on it, no matter how many countermeasures
Smith tries to deploy.
Originally posted on David Poole's
blog, "Life in the Turn Lane," available
online at turn-lane.blogspot.com.
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JOHNNY CRAWFORD/ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/MCT
A large number of seats remained empty in the grandstand during the Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
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Kurt Busch:
He's back and driving backward. Somehow that seems appropriate.
