It really doesn’t matter to me that Kyle Busch won the inaugural Sprint Cup race at the Kentucky Speedway, what sticks in my mind is the complete and utter mismanagement of this facility. They knew full well how many tickets they sold and in relation to that how many people they would need to direct traffic and park cars not to mention how many people to staff the concession stands or how much food and drink to order. In case you haven’t heard or you have been living under a rock, the Inaugural race at the Kentucky Speedway was a logistical nightmare! That is putting it lightly, I had other words in mind something to do with a cluster something or other but I’ll keep it clean. I am ashamed, upset, and a generally annoyed with the past weekends event. For years prior to this even, namely the Quaker State 400, we have heard and read about Speedway Motorsports inc. or SMI wanting a cup race at Kentucky. Hell there was even a lawsuit over the deal. One of Nascar’s main concerns was that the track did not have the facilities to handle a “Cup Sized Crowd”. Bruton Smith assured then that by the time they got a race there the facility would be able to handle the crowd. What a joke!
There were so many problems last weekend where do I start? Lets start with the traffic problem. The interstate there near Sparta Kentucky is not in any way suited for the amount of traffic a Sprint Cup race will bring to the area. Oh they resurfaced it but they didn’t add enough lanes or provide any more access roads going into the track property. What we had last weekend was gridlock 20 miles in either direction. There were an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people that never made it to the track due to the traffic. Those that did get there late found that there was no parking left and were turned away. People were mad as hell and threw their tickets at anyone who looked like they worked for the event. That was probably not happening as often as I think because that brings me to problem number two. There was no organized management of the parking system there. I mean people were reported to be parking all Willy Nilly without much direction form anyone affiliated with the track. People were allowed to set up camp so to speak in the parking areas, setting up tents, dinning fly’s and a myriad of other tail gaiting stuff taking up more than one parking spot sometime two or three. There were reported parking lots that were half empty because there was little or no communication between the lightly scattered parking attendants.
The problems didn’t stop with traffic and parking, they continued on into the campgrounds and the facility itself. There was no ice to be found for sale in any of the campgrounds by the time that the Sprint Cup race was winding up. In the middle of the influx of traffic they had porta john service trucks pumping out motor homes and portable toilets causing traffic to have to attempt to go around them. Once you got into the track the concession stand promptly ran out of food and shortly after that they ran completely out of any kind of beverage. It was very hot in Sparta Kentucky this past weekend and you couldn’t even buy a bottle of water inside the track. So did people think ahead and bring a cooler inside? Uh hell no! Coolers were not allowed into Kentucky Speedway this past weekend, it seems like Bruton Smith and his gang of cronies was only concerned with making money this weekend. Did they have a big meeting a month before hand and figure out that if they ran it half staffed and only bought so much food they could make a killing off of the stupid fans in this area of the country?
Let me tell you something, had I been in that crowd on the road in and not got in I would never be coming back! Nor would I be had I been inside the track and found that after I was told to take my cooler back to the car, that there was nothing to drink inside the concession stands, same reaction! I’m done with Kentucky Speedway and SMI in general! I mean come on SMI! You sorry people argued and argued for years to get a cup race there and this is how you handle it? You just made Nascar’s point in the past lawsuit for them. The first thing that Bruton Smith did was blame the Kentucky infrastructure namely the roads and interstates around the speedway! Are you serious? You had understaffed parking crews that couldn’t communicate worth a dang, people camping in the parking lots taking up needed parking space and such and you want to attempt to blame the roads? How about you fix your management of that track from the top down before you dump on the people of Kentucky? Maybe that was a completely dumb place to put a track in the first place? I remember the folks at Nascar warning the people that built that track there about building a track before you could be guaranteed a race date there. It only took twelve years to get a cup race there gee in that amount of time you would have thought that they would have been working on some kind of a plan to handle the crowd! Do you see the waisted lanes in this picture? There is no traffic going out so why not use all four lanes? This is just plain dumb Bruton!
If I were Bruton Smith I would fire the whole dang crew from the top down and start fresh! If I were Brian France I would pull all cup dates from that track until they prove that they can handle it. As far as the racing goes there it was fantastic but it was far overshadowed by one hell of a mess off the track!
In my opinion the previous weekends events at the Kentucky Speedway were an utter failure! I don’t care if the racing was the best that the world has ever seen, if twenty thousand race fans missed the whole damned thing because of traffic, then the whole thing was a failure!
Today I am embarrassed to be a Nascar fan.
Stay safe out there
TW
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