It's normally one of the toughest tickets in all auto racing but this year there are tickets available for August 21-22 Sharpie 500 races at Bristol. Ticket prices start at $145 and go up to $209 and include both the Friday Food City 250 and the Sharpie 500. Both are night races and the tickets can be purchased either through the track itself at Bristol Motor Speedway or through normal sporting event ticket vendors.
Is NASCAR Losing Appeal?
“The economy changed everything,” the seven-time champion Richard Petty said in a February article in the New York Times.
Workers have been laid off at many tracks, corporate sponsors, who are also feeling the pinch of the economy have pulled out, and ticket sales are down even at storied tracks like Bristol, Daytona and Darlington.
In a June 12 story out of Charlotte, it was announced the restructuring of General Motors has caused Kevin Harvick and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to lose their factory support for their Nationwide and Truck series teams. As the old saying goes, what starts at the top, filters down to every level and that means the fans lining up to see the races. For a small city like Bristol, which heavily relies on the revenue from the two races there, that can be deadly.
The March race, the Food City 500, sold out despite the sliding economy. It was the 54th consecutive sellout at Bristol. According to a story in TriCities.com by Daniel Gilbert and Mac McLean, the spending on hotels, restraurants and other businesses in all of the communites surrounding the track were down.
Why Tickets Suddenly Exist At Bristol
According to reports coming from the Bristol Motor Speedway the key is to the slowdown in demand is because corporate sponsors are reserving fewer and fewer seats. This is opening up tickets and causing BMS to ratchet up the marketing machine for the Sharpie race, an unnecessary and, perhaps unthinkable tactic last year or any year in the past decade.
History Is Kind To Bristol
When the half-mile track was built on diary farm land in 1960, there was seating for 16,000 for the first NASCAR race, the Volunteer 500, held there on July 30, 1961. Seating capacity today is 160,000.
Jack Smith, who didn't finish the race because he turned over the driving to Johnny Allen after the first 290 laps, won the $3,225 purse. Smith and Allen's Pontiac averaged 68.370 miles per hour in the victory. Carl Lewis won the Sharpie 500 last year collecting a purse of $344,625 and averaging 91.581 mph.
