Support Your Local Short Track in 2009

With Spring rapidly approaching it won’t be long until our local short tracks begin opening up for their regular weekly racing programs. Now would be a good time to check the schedules of nearby tracks and commit ourselves to attending several events in our area for the coming year.

Living in New Jersey, I’ve become quite familiar with seeing race tracks close their gates. And when they do, it’s almost always forever. With the economic forecasts looking rather bleak, now is the time more than ever to support our local tracks if we expect to sustain grassroots racing.

What can we do to support short track racing? There are two things in particular that I think will be most important this season.

The first is obvious: patronize our tracks. If we don’t show up and make it profitable for owners to run these events, they’re going to close up and move on to something else. Another thing to consider is that for the price of a typical NASCAR Sprint Cup ticket, one can instead attend four or five local short track races. Not only that, but the food is cheaper, the action is much closer, the grandstands are more comfortable, and chances are the races will be more exciting. If that isn’t motivating enough to ditch our Cup tickets, think about it this way: the less money we spend on NASCAR, the less money that ends up in Kyle Busch’s wallet. (Yeah… I knew that would clinch it.)

The second point is just as important: we have to be more willing to express to track operators — in constructive ways — what we like and what we don’t like. If there’s a particular show or event we enjoyed, we should tell them. If there was something that we didn’t think was so great, let them know that too. Having a pulse on what the fans want is pivotal to making good business decisions.

The tracks that understand that their primary customer is the racing fan, and work to expand their customer base by attracting fans (both hardcore and casual) based on their preferences, will, in my view, be more likely to weather the coming economic storm.

So dust off the blankets and goggles and let’s get ready for a fun year of racing in 2009.