LOUDON, N.H. — Bruton Smith boasted about the largest crowd to attend a NASCAR race this season: More than 100,000 fans filled Kentucky Speedway in its inaugural Sprint Cup Series event.
Unfortunately for NASCAR, it was the fans who couldn’t get there that got the headlines.
The lasting memory of the race is not Kyle Busch taking the checkered flag, but the gridlocked cars filled with fans who were, in NASCAR terms, red-flagged and forced to sit on Interstate 71 with no shot at making the big pass and arriving to the track in time for the start — or even the halfway point — of the race.
Smith, the track owner, and NASCAR officials want answers to why fans were stuck in traffic for hours as they tried to get to Saturday night’s race at the track in Sparta, Ky.
Smith said he will meet next week with Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear to start finding some solutions.
Smith absorbed some of the blame but stopped well short of saying there was more the track could have done to avoid the problem. He blamed everyone from the company handling parking (“they did a lousy job”), to I-71 (“a lousy piece of interstate”), to the fans who were warned about the trouble ahead but still left late.
“When I tell you we will fix it, I hope that you believe me,” Smith said Friday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
NASCAR president Mike Helton called the traffic a “very serious issue” that must be corrected, adding that NASCAR “won’t rest” until it figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Many fans say once they got to the gate, they were turned away by police because the track had run out of parking.
Speedway Motorsports Inc. president Marcus Smith said fans can swap their unused Kentucky tickets for entry into events at any 2011 race at an SMI track. They also can be swapped for the 2012 race at Kentucky.
