Every indication is that the first running of the Cup Series at Kentucky Speedway is going to produce boffo returns. The 107,000 grandstand seats at owner Bruton Smith's expanded Speedway are already sold out.
Jake Jennings, longtime motorsports writer at the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, the newspaper in Kentucky's unofficial NASCAR capital, says a bus company (Komfort Koaches) in the hometown of the racing Waltrip brothers has chartered three buses to take people from Daviess County to the Cup race in Sparta.
Long term, there may be strong enough motorsports interest in the commonwealth that the Cup race is a major event on a sustained basis, even if not one new fan is made.
The Louisville television market is consistently one of the strongest in the country for Cup Series races. This year, Louisville had the 10th-highest rating (14.6) for the telecast of the Daytona 500. In 2010, the Derby City TV market ranked sixth for the broadcast of the season-opening Daytona event.
Writing last week in The Daytona Beach News-Journal (the newspaper in the hometown of NASCAR's corporate offices), Ken Willis noted that two of the primary markets served by Kentucky Speedway, Louisville and Dayton, Ohio, are part of a triangle with Indianapolis in which all three "are often found in the top 10 of Nielsen's NASCAR (TV) ratings."
It's harder to quantify, but the belief is that NASCAR is highly popular in Kentucky's rural counties in the eastern and western parts of the state, too.
- Mark Story, Lexington Herald Leader
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