Commentary: Perhaps Kentucky should forgo its 2012 Cup date

Commentary: Perhaps Kentucky should forgo its 2012 Cup date

By Reid Spencer

Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(July 12, 2011)

It’s not enough to say you’re sorry.

It’s not enough to promise to fix the problem.

It’s not enough to give free admissions to fans who can prove with an unused ticket that they failed to make it to last Saturday night’s inaugural Sprint Cup race at Kentucky Speedway.

The traffic jam that brought Kentucky to a standstill requires huge remedial action—not just a solution to the problem itself but also a more-than-generous gesture to fans who were robbed of their time and ticket money by what can only be described as an egregious shortfall in planning.

Sadly, the speedway and its parent company, Speedway Motorsports Inc., have given every indication they will ignore the lessons of very recent history stemming from the 2008 tire debacle at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway, NASCAR and tire maker Goodyear apologized for the problem.

They promised to fix it before the next race.

They did not, however—in concert or individually—offer to compensate ticket holders or give future free admissions to fans who sat through a race run 10 laps at a time until one or more tires exploded.

Indy paid the price. Through extensive testing and experimentation, Goodyear fixed the tire problem before the Cup series returned to IMS in 2009. Unfortunately, many fans didn’t care and didn’t return with the Cup cars.

There were 240,000 fans in the stands for the 2008 race. Last year, the estimated attendance for the Brickyard 400 was 140,000. The people who stayed home could have filled the Rose Bowl, or close to it. Even with an allowance for a flagging economy, 100,000 fans lost is a massive number.

In 2008, the fans at Indy saw a race, such as it was. At Kentucky, thousands of fans saw part of a race—or none at all. An estimated 20,000 ticket holders never made it to the speedway. Those are the fans SMI seeks to compensate by offering free admission to a Cup race at its other properties this season or next year at Kentucky.

Unless SMI comes up with a meaningful way to compensate all fans who sat in traffic for hours, whether or not they eventually got to the race, Kentucky Speedway will lose the public relations war, and it’s already getting bloody.

The Internet is full of anecdotal horror stories about fans who were turned away, saw nothing but the final 20 laps of Kyle Busch’s victory or abandoned their cars and jogged for three miles in the summer heat to experience Kentucky’s coming-out party.

Imagine Woodstock without the romance, and substitute hostility for brotherhood.

Kentucky’s competitors in the Midwest already are on the offensive. Indy is offering attractive incentives to anyone who held a Kentucky ticket—not just those who missed the race. Clearly, the Brickyard took the lessons of 2008 to heart.

Michigan International Speedway president Roger Curtis didn’t miss the opportunity to pounce. “Just to be clear: This isn’t about kicking a racetrack when it’s down,” Curtis wrote in a letter to the MIS e-mail list, before pointing out everything that was wrong with the Kentucky experience.

The letter ended: “We won’t undercut our loyal customers with a knee-jerk ticket offer to make up for what happened on Saturday. But we will match what our loyal customers received by offering any race fan who has not had their expectations met at any racetrack with our lowest ticket price of the season for seats in Turns 1 and 3.

“Send us your race ticket and you can purchase a reserved ticket for $45 for the August 21 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Pure Michigan 400 at Michigan International Speedway.”

The message was as powerful as it was transparent. Fans could drive the 237 miles from Cincinnati, the closest major city to Kentucky Speedway (41 miles), and get inside the racetrack in Michigan in less time than they spent sitting in traffic on Saturday.

Talladega Superspeedway, 465 miles to the south, chimed in. “After hearing how fans had it at Kentucky this weekend, I wanted to let them know that we’re ready to show how a race weekend is supposed to be run,” track president Grant Lynch wrote in a widely distributed release.

SMI chairman Bruton Smith can’t be unaware that his competitors are going for the throat. To react with anything less than a monumental gesture, regardless of cost, will fall short and in the long run will prove more costly than doing nothing or doing little, as Indy found out after 2008.

Here’s a one-word idea: refund. Make it available to anyone who sat in traffic on Saturday—or says they did.

Here’s a more complex idea: Give the 2012 Kentucky date back to Atlanta Motor Speedway and give Kentucky a year to work out the problems with local government and law enforcement, another sector that wasn’t blameless in the fiasco.

If not, then proceed on the current course, and do as little as possible to assuage inconvenienced fans, and let the attrition begin.

Come to think of it, that’s probably the surest way to guarantee there won’t be a traffic problem next year.

 

**RACING HELLON WHEELS AGREES WITH THIS COMMENTATOR