LDN - Sports

NASCAR betting on Las Vegas, road race in Charlotte

[March 10, 2017] By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange

It has been seven years since NASCAR announced it was moving two races in one season. This time, it's a little different - and likely for the better.

The announcement that the schedule in 2018 will have a second race in Las Vegas during the playoffs was not unusual. Once again, Speedway Motorsports owner Bruton Smith is moving a race date from one of his under-performing tracks - this time the New Hampshire Motor Speedway - to a venue where ticket sales are expected to be robust.

The unusual wrinkle is Smith's flagship facility in Charlotte moving its oval race to a road course that uses part of the banking and an infield circuit.

By announcing the realignment of next year's schedule, NASCAR officials confirmed they are in favor of these moves. It is hoped the promoter will get a boost from ticket sales -- which will reflect positively on the sanctioning body's premier Cup property -- and NASCAR's TV partner will get more excitement by adding a third road race to the schedule.

NASCAR fans enjoy the "town takeover" that occurs in Las Vegas when approximately 100,000 people show up for a race weekend and the opportunity for fantastic voyages down the other-worldly Strip.

It's a no-brainer that a similar number of fans will show up for a second Las Vegas event during the playoffs.

But a road race in one of the Southeast's longstanding high-banked ovals constitutes a radical departure. Given that road races invariably have fewer than 10 lead changes, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom that NASCAR fans prefer to see frequent lead changes on an oval under green flag conditions.

But it's hard to argue with the thinking of Smith and his son Marcus, who now runs the SMI empire on a day-to-day basis. First, the intermediate ovals such as Charlotte are seeing fewer and fewer lead changes due to well-engineered cars and a tightly configured rules package that lends itself to one team "hitting the jackpot" with its set-up. Last year's May race in Charlotte found Martin Truex Jr. leading all but 12 miles of a 600-mile race. Last weekend's race on Atlanta's 1.54-mile oval was dominated by Kevin Harvick, who led all but 33 laps.

Fans have been responding to road races and voicing an interest in seeing a road race in the playoffs. In addition to making for some dramatic TV, the road race at Watkins Glen constitutes one of the few sellouts on the current Cup schedule. It's difficult to tell if these ticket buyers are fans of the track and road racing, longtime NASCAR fans or new ones. In any case, road racing is one way for NASCAR to introduce a new perspective. As with this year's move to races with three stages, NASCAR has little to lose by altering its course to help bring back fans or create new ones.

Another key element of the switch to a road race was to maintain the number of intermediate ovals on the schedule during the playoffs. If the 1.5-mile Las Vegas oval was added to the existing schedule, without the switch to a road circuit in Charlotte, it would have meant six of the intermediate tracks - derisively referred to as "cookie cutters" -- out of the 10 playoff dates.

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If the championship represents how well a driver performs on all types of NASCAR tracks, then the playoffs should reflect the variety of tracks on the overall schedule. The current 36-race Cup season has 12 of 36 on races in the 1.5-mile range, including Darlington's 1.366-mile oval. There are six traditional short-track events, six on 1.0-mile tracks, six on tracks of 2.0 miles or more run without restrictor plates, four on restrictor-plate tracks and two on road courses.

When it comes to the playoffs, currently there are five intermediate tracks, three 1.0-mile ovals, one traditional short track and one restrictor-plate race. The one glaring omission? A road circuit.

The last time two races were moved on the Cup schedule was in the 2011 season. The Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., lost one of its two dates to the Kansas Speedway -- home to NASCAR's sponsor Sprint at the time and also the site of a new gambling casino and hotel complex. Each of those two tracks is owned by the International Speedway Corp., which like NASCAR is owned by the France family. That same year, the Atlanta Motor Speedway lost one its two dates to the Kentucky Speedway in a move by Smith to bring a Cup date to a track in the Bluegrass State -- one located near the Fortune 500-laden corporate metropolis of Cincinnati across the Ohio River.

Both of those changes led to good attendance at the Kansas and Kentucky tracks. (By dropping to one date neither the Auto Club nor Atlanta experienced a bounce in attendance.)

Heading into Sunday's race in Las Vegas, a city that has come up with a $2.5 million sponsorship package to get the second race, the focus on the schedule change has been intense enough to overtake another significant realignment story. Ford has been running roughshod over Chevy and Toyota in laps led and victories in the season's first two races. The switch by Stewart-Haas Racing to Ford resulted in a Daytona 500 victory and all those laps led by Harvick in Atlanta before Team Penske Ford driver Brad Keselowski took the victory.

As with the need for a variety of tracks on the schedule, NASCAR needs a variety of manufacturers in victory lane. There's no panic yet in the Chevy and Toyota camps, but it's clear Ford has made a big leap forward with its realignment program that brought in SHR.

If the remaining intermediate oval races look anything like Atlanta, Ford could have one of its drivers hoisting the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series trophy at season's end for the first time since Kurt Busch won the inaugural "playoff" title in 2004. Sunday's race on a 1.5-mile track thus has more than the usual significance for an early-season encounter.

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