NASCAR betting on Las Vegas, road race in Charlotte
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[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.
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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.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2017/Mar/10/images/ads/current/st_claras_lda_082114.png)
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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