Who didn’t see this one coming? I knew Nashville Super speedway was soon to be on the chopping block after Dover Motorsports Group failed to effectively market the last couple of races at Gateway. They refused to lower ticket prices for those last two St. Louis area races and there was little or no advertising promoting the races in the St. Louis metro area. I watched poor management of the Memphis Motorsports Park shut that facility down in the same manner. It almost seems like they were intentionally trying to make it fail, for what reasons I can only wonder about. Now Nashville is coming off the schedule for both the Nationwide series and the Camping World truck series for the 2012 season. This move came in the middle of Nascar working out the details of the 2012 schedule so now we potentially have four race dates open, two in the Nationwide series and two in the truck series. I don’t know what Nascar will do with these dates yet but we are in the general time frame that we come to every year where we should have the next years schedule within the next 30 days.
I was listening to someone on Nascar radio earlier today talking about the fact that Rusty Wallace and his partners up there at Iowa Speedway want a Sprint Cup race date. SMI and ISC hold the vast majority of race dates for the Sprint cup, Pocono has two and Dover has two. So if you are Rusty Wallace and the Iowa Speedway group where do you get a race date? I’m going to predict this very minute that there will soon be at least one Sprint cup race date open after the 2012 season if not two. I hereby predict that the implosion of the Dover Motorsports Group will continue until they either close or sell Dover International Speedway. This is where Rusty and his crew will be able to get their cup dates. I honestly don’t think Dover Motorsports Group can pull out of this nosedive and will be forced to sell the big track in Dover Delaware. They don’t seem to be able to handle promoting the races to a point where people want to come to the track and I darn sure don’t see any acknowledgement of the fact that the economy is still in the crapper and continuing to spiral downwards. People cannot afford to come to the races unless you make it economical for them.
I can speak to the St. Louis area specifically because that is where I grew up; when they first built that track they promoted the living heck out of it. They sold or gave away tickets to all of the local Dodge dealers since they were sponsoring the race. You could go by your local Dodge dealer and pick up a couple of free tickets for the truck race. If you needed a few more they were not that badly priced that you couldn’t pick up a couple more at the track office once you got there. The stands were packed. As the years went by the management started to slack off on the promotion of the facility and the Nascar racing weekends so the crowds faltered a little more each year. Poor management of the parking facilities led to nightmare parking issues and that drove more fans away from Gateway. The track itself is squeezed in between the NHRA drag strip and Illinois route 203 so all the parking is across the street next to the Pilot truck stop and in front of a huge garbage land fill. I know I have talked about this here before but it bears repeating; Gateway started out as a NHRA drag strip that was highly successful and had very little parking problems. They built that oval track right on top of the drag strip’s parking lot! It was a dumb idea to begin with and was destined to fail unless you got the state to move route 203 so it ran behind the truck stop. I think they were over budget to begin with so that was never going to happen.
When they built the Memphis Motorsports Park they built it on an old industrial park way up in the middle of nowhere north east of Memphis. You had to have a map to find the darn thing and were certain to get lost trying to find your way out after any race placing you smack dab in the middle of some of the worst neighborhoods in the Memphis area. The location of Gateway was no better, miss a turn there and you are in either Venice, Brooklyn or East St. Louis. Neither place is somewhere you want to be after dark. The location of these two speedways tells me that they either already had the land or got it cheap enough that they thought they could make it work for them. In any Business the key thought before you start is always Location, Location, location! Neither of these two tracks had that going for them at the onset. Add that to poor management and they were doomed to fail.
I really thought that they had learned from their past mistakes when they built the Nashville Super speedway. It was built outside the Nashville metro area far enough to be in the market yet not be effected by the city traffic too badly. It was built out on the new bypass 840 and looked to be a great facility. The only drawback that I saw in it was that they made the racing surface concrete. Over time concrete racing surfaces can trend to one lane racing which can lead to boring racing. As a matter of fact the last nationwide race there was a snoozer. I realized that they were inept at running a track as well as promoting it when they failed to promote the last double dip weekend there at Nashville. They lowered ticket prices but obviously not enough to fill the stands. Today I heard more than a few callers from the Nashville area, call in on Nascar radio explaining that they had no idea that there was a race or two there recently because there was no promotion.
I think this is a case of some big money men coming into the sport again and failing to make a go of it because they have no idea what the hell they are doing. Dover started out as a horse track. You know? Betting? There is a casino right there by the track. These people are not race fans they are moneymen. Moneymen who got in way over their heads in my opinion. Remember the most recent familiar name George Gillett, how about Bobby Ginn? Both were resort owners who wanted to get into Nascar for the Money. Remember Alex Meshkin and Bang racing? They ran one season in the truck series then imploded after the money ran out. Various lawsuits ensued from team members and suppliers after Meshkin left the team hanging. I believe that Dover Motorsports Group is the very same thing only on a higher level. Anyone whether it be an individual or a group, who gets into Nascar for the money and not because that is the sole love of their life as far as sports goes, is destined to fail.
The Monster Mile will crumble as well; I’ll take that bet no problem. The only way it remains for more than a couple of seasons is if Bruton Smith or the France family buy it.
Stay safe
TW
If you liked that post, then try these...
No comments:
Post a Comment