BRISTOL, Tenn. — Rob Stiens won two tickets to Bristol Motor Speedway as his company’s employee of the month. Unable to find affordable lodging close to the track, and unwilling to stay in a hotel three hours away, his seats will go empty tonight.
Once the toughest ticket in NASCAR, Bristol is now just like every other track that’s struggling to attract fans in a tough economy. The track’s streak of 55 consecutive sellouts was snapped during its March race, and tonight’s event — one of the most beloved on the schedule — also will fall short of capacity.
“My last race at Bristol was the spring race (in 2009), and we decided that it’s just too much money to continue going,” said Stiens, a Fayetteville, Ohio, milkman who gave up his season tickets to Bristol Motor Speedway last year after 14 years.
“I got these tickets from my company two weeks ago, tried to find somewhere reasonable to stay, and the nearest place was $189 a night,” Stiens said. “Anything cheaper was in Knoxville, and that’s about three hours away. It’s easier to just watch it on TV at home.”
There won’t be a full house at Thunder Valley tonight when the speedway celebrates its 100th Sprint Cup race. Kevin Triplett, vice president of Bristol’s public affairs, did not release ticket sale information but said if everyone who bought a ticket shows up, “it’s going to look pretty close to full.”
Still, anything less than capacity was unheard of during a massive growth spurt in the 1990s, when track officials had a lengthy waiting list and ran ticket sales much like the NCAA does for its basketball tournament. Fans signed up for a package of four, and if something came available, names were picked through a lottery.
Now, with 160,000 seats and only about 6,000 hotel rooms in the immediate Tri-Cities area, Bristol officials are having to launch creative marketing strategies for the first time in more than two decades. The sellout streak began in 1982 when the track had just 30,000 seats.
“I don’t think anyone is immune,” five-time Bristol winner Jeff Gordon said. “It’s just like a top team is not immune to sponsorship negotiations, and a racetrack is not immune to the economy and whatever decision-making is going on out there among fans as to what races they choose to go to and what obstacles lie in their way to get to those tracks.
“I still think people, everywhere I go, love Bristol and love Talladega and love NASCAR. But I think when there are tough times, they have to make tough decisions.”
Triplett has heard from many heartbroken fans who, after years of attending the Saturday night race, simply can’t come this year.
“As challenging and disappointing as it was to finally see the sellout string come to an end, we looked at why and how do we fix it?” Triplett said. “We found that 62 percent of the people surveyed said the economy, and that’s the harsh reality of it.”
Despite trying to work with local leaders and hotel owners on pricing, Triplett said the demand outweighs the supply, and rates simply can’t be negotiated the way they are in many other NASCAR markets.
“It’s challenging for some of our fans to pay as much for lodging for a race weekend as they would for a couple nights in New York City,” Triplett said. “But even with these challenges, we recognize that we have an enormously large facility that is almost double the capacity of the Dallas Cowboys, who led the NFL in attendance last season.
“Even short of a sellout, we will still have more people here — many more people — than any NFL game in the country.”
