Thursday, March 03, 2005
Lighting up track brightens the future
Aaron McFarling
Recent columns
MARTINSVILLE - There was a lot of talk about history here Wednesday. The term "grass roots" was tossed around quite a bit, as it often is in racing circles.
But Wednesday's announcement - that NASCAR's modified series will be returning to Martinsville Speedway to run the track's first ever night race - has as much to do with the future as anything else. Southern Virginia's historic speedway is flipping the switch. Joining the trend. Trying to keep up.
And for a track faced with an uncertain future, the idea isn't half bad.
The lights are only temporary. They'll be brought in three days before the Sept.3 event, whisked away after 250 white-knuckle, open-wheel laps. But in the interim, you can bet speedway officials will be taking notes, and it might not be long until we see a Nextel Cup event here finish after dusk.
"It's a good opportunity for our sheriff's department to see how things flow at night," speedway president Clay Campbell said of the Labor Day weekend event. "It's a good opportunity for our operations department to see the problems that we have running at nighttime. So it's good for everybody, for NASCAR and the fans.
"So it is a good trial run. Who knows what the future holds as far as another event being run at night?"
That's as close as Campbell would come to addressing night-racing's future at Martinsville. But one look at the 2005 Nextel Cup schedule shows you that this is where the sport is heading.
More and more, NASCAR wants to appeal to the West Coast television markets, and it's hard to do that at Martinsville when both races, which will start at 12:30 p.m. local time, 9:30 a.m. Pacific, get underway during breakfast in Los Angeles.
Permanent lights would allow some flexibility in the scheduling. A 3 p.m. local time start for the October race would be manageable. A Saturday night race could be considered.
Pleasing NASCAR is a must for Martinsville, which was sold last May to International Speedway Corp. Even though it sells out its Cup events and remains a fan favorite, the speedway is in danger of losing one or both of its Cup dates as the sport continues to expand to larger markets.
Campbell insists that adding the modified race has nothing to do with such speculation.
"There are no [Cup Series] assurances past 2005, but Talladega doesn't have assurances past 2005," Campbell said. "Nobody does. It's a year-to-year deal, and they don't give you any hint whatsoever as to the future. So that's nothing that has changed. It's the same thing it was 5 or 10 years ago.
"We feel confident moving forward. The money we have spent in the past nine months is probably as much as we've ever spent, redoing the catch fence, moving the railroads. We've spent millions of dollars to improve what we have, and I don't think we'd be doing any of that if we knew our revenue stream would be cut in half."
So perhaps a Cup race at night will be just another improvement, but none of that can materialize without careful planning. Serving more than 60,000 fans is complicated enough in the daytime. The modified race, which Campbell hopes can draw 15,000-20,000 spectators, can provide numerous lessons.
The event itself ought to be pretty cool, too. Those cars run up to 10 mph faster than Cup cars, and 43 of them in a .526-mile bullring should put on quite a show. And lest we forget, modifieds have longtime ties to Martinsville - they were the first division to race on the track in 1947 and raced here as recently as 2002.
But in today's NASCAR climate, there's little time to reminisce. When the lights are turned on this September, they'll be showing the way to the future, not the past.
