Uhh Why Are They Leaving?

On July 6th Nascar announced that beginning with the 2012 season the Nationwide series as well as the truck series would be moving from Lucas Oil Raceway Park over in Clermont Indiana to the Big track, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway. For the life of me I cannot understand why nor can I find an explanation from Nascar that makes sense, they claim that they are doing it to try and revitalize the “Brickyard 400” weekend that has started to slack off in recent years. Does anyone in the upper offices at Nascar realize that there is a really bad economy right now? This is a major dumb move on Nascar’s part, I don’t care if you give away the tickets for free there will still be fans who cannot afford to go to the race because they are broke. You could give me free tickets to Italy right now and all I could do is fly over there and turn right around and come home because I couldn’t afford to even stay one night.

            They think that they are going to fill the stands for a Nationwide race, a truck race and some Grand Am road racing action. This is insane, the 30,000 fans that filled Lucas Oil Raceway Park are not going to fill the big track. At least not in any capacity that would make it look like any kind of successful venture. I can’t wait to see 30,000 people in a stadium that holds 257,000 people next season, which will look like the biggest loser event of the new era of Nascar. There is no camping there; Indianapolis Motor Speedway is in the middle of a Neighbor hood you Dolts! Do they really believe that fans are going to deal with that traffic situation for two races in the lower series? For a short track, Lucas Oil Raceway Park has had very little traffic problems in the past. Any that they had they corrected very quickly. It is short track racing at it’s very best, beating and banging fenders, tempers flaring, drivers and crews going home mad at each other and all. That’s what put the fans in the stands! So now you want to take all that and put it over on a 2.5 mile oval flat track where passing is very difficult and racing tends to get boring. You can’t pass worth a crap there, this is going to fail big time!

            Oh don’t get me wrong now, they will probably have a good turnout the first time that they do it but it won’t be anything close to a sell out. As a matter of fact they will probably have to white wash the whole event so to speak to make it look like it was more of a success that it really was. You know how they do that don’t you? They keep the camera’s of the stands where there are huge gaps in the seats, the television personalities hype the event up so you feel like you should have gone. Stuff like that. They won’t ever tell us how many people actually went through the turnstiles. It wouldn’t surprise me if Nascar and IMS secretly buy up a bunch of empty seats so they can claim more ticket sales than actual fans in the seats. If anybody working at IMS ever reads this I would love to have the turnstile numbers on these events after the fact.

            One other thing about this that may be the only positive in the deal is that a few car owners in the lower series said that finding sponsorship for the big track would be a lot easier than if they were at LORP. I think I heard Kelley Earnhardt and Delana Harvick mentioning this, both during interviews with Dave Moody. I don’t ever remember seeing a KHI or JR Motorsports car running at LORP without sponsorship. Seems to me they were doing just fine weren’t they? No matter how much perfume you put on a pig, it’s still a pig! Eventually the perfume wears off and the stink comes back. Then you have to face reality that you have a smelly pig on your hands and you have to do something about it. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when the managers of LORP got the news that Nascar was dumping them. I doubt what went around the room was anything that could have been repeated in church. I don’t know what the attendance was for this weekends events over in Clermont but last year the short track drew 40,000 fans when the big track was down over 100,000 after the tire debacle in 2008 along with the fact that the Midwest and northern Indiana and Ohio have been hit hard by what is being called a recession. People are broke in the Mid West Nascar, what do they need to hear to make them understand this? You can’t fix it because it has nothing to do with you, you Idiots. If you have a hole in your bucket and you continually try to put water in it, it will just continue to leak until you fix the hole. If it’s not your bucket then you better stop putting water in it until the owner fixes it.(Wow did that sound country or what?)

            There were a million critics against Nascar coming to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, many saying that it won’t work or it will fail after the new wears off of it. Throw Goodyear’s failure to stick with a proven tire and maybe these critics were right. You can’t fix stupid. Isn’t that what Ron White said? Ever since Brian France took over there has been a bit of that going around.

            I wish them luck. They are going to need it.

Stay safe out there

TW

P.S. As far as the future of Lucas Oil Raceway Park goes, it is owned by the NHRA so it may survive for a drag racing venue but I’ll lay heavy odds that this will be the death of another short track at the hands of the France family.

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