All is not well in NASCARland. Seems ticket sales aren’t what they once were — as of Wednesday, tickets were still available for this Sunday’s race in Martinsville. And you can get still get tickets for the May race in Richmond, with Richmond being among the more difficult tickets to get. Martinsville head honcho Clay Campbell isn’t all that worried though:
If you look back to when some tracks didn’t sell out in the past, that was when everybody else was selling out. It’s different now. If we were the only ones not to sell out, then I would have a concern.
NASCAR fans are noted for traveling some distance to get to races, and the high price of gas being blamed (at least in part) for declining ticket sales. Still, there are fewer races in the Southeast than there were as recently as 2004, so the gas price argument only goes so far.
And if fewer people are will to travel to see an actual race, it also raises the question of how many will travel how often to go to something like, well, a NASCAR Hall of Fame. Not that anyplace near here has large sums of public money invested in such a venture. Oh wait, besides Charlotte, that is.
