After abrupt NASCAR exit, what went wrong for Kentucky Speedway?
It was June 17, 2000, when Jerry Carroll and the original owners of Kentucky Speedway first showed off the $152 million racetrack they had built on what had been a Gallatin County cattle farm.
A throng of 63,750 fans showed up to see Greg Biffle win the first NASCAR event at the new track, a trucks series race.
Alas, heavy rainfall that night turned the Speedway’s all-grass parking lots into giant mud pits, stranding some fans at the track.
“I should have known (when) we had that first race and we had that rain — maybe we were (snake-)bitten by something down there,” Carroll said Wednesday.
The star-crossed history of Kentucky Speedway reached its nadir Wednesday when NASCAR officially announced that its 2021 race schedules will not include visits to Sparta.
No Cup Series race for Kentucky.
No Xfinity Series race for Kentucky.
No trucks series race for Kentucky.
For a track that has been running Cup races since 2011, Xfinity races since 2001 and trucks races since that rainy night in 2000, it is a resounding fall from grace.
“It’s devastating,” said Gallatin County Judge-Executive Jon Ryan Morris.
At his daily news conference, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called on NASCAR to reconsider.
“We’re going to do everything we can to encourage a return and also want to get more information on the whys,” Beshear said.
Rather than at Kentucky, the 11th NASCAR Cup Series Quaker State 400 will be run at Atlanta Motor Speedway, a track that, like Kentucky, is owned by Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports.
Kentucky Speedway General Manager Mark Simendinger did not return phone calls Wednesday. But it appears the Sparta track fell victim to a NASCAR push to diversify the types of racetracks on which it runs.
A dirt race at Bristol and six road-course events were on the 2021 Cup Series schedule announced Wednesday.
Mile-and-a-half tracks such as Kentucky are falling out of favor, deemed to produce too much uninteresting racing. Another such track, Chicagoland Speedway, also lost its NASCAR dates for 2021.
Kentucky Speedway’s tenure as a Cup Series track was bizarre from the start.
When new track owner Smith announced he was bringing the long-elusive Cup date to Kentucky Speedway for 2011 from his Atlanta track, NASCAR mania took over.
Before race night, every ticket in the newly expanded, 106,000-seat Kentucky Speedway grandstands was sold.
However, the parking plan in place at the Speedway was not ready for prime time. A massive traffic tie-up outside the track prevented thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of ticket holders from ever reaching the race.
Morris, the Gallatin County Judge-Executive, was a deputy sheriff in 2011.
“I was working on the traffic detail (that night),” Morris says. “As a police officer, that was a nightmare. A lot of people needed (to be) parked. We couldn’t get them parked.”
After the traffic debacle, Speedway Motorsports spent between $8 and $10 million on parking enhancements at Kentucky Speedway.
Meanwhile, the Kentucky state government chipped in some $3.7 million to both widen the road outside the Speedway and the exit off of I-71 to the track. The state’s money also built a tunnel to allow spectators to cross underneath a road and reach the track from new parking lots.
Yet once Kentucky Speedway became equipped to park a massive crowd, it never got a second chance to do so. “Every year since (2011), the crowd has never been what it was that first year,” Morris says. “Never close.”
Beshear said it was dismaying that the state of Kentucky had invested so much in infrastructure around the track only to lose NASCAR racing. “It would be pretty disappointing that we make all of those investments to support one of these races and then we not have it,” he said.
In the commonwealth of Kentucky, the NASCAR Cup Series was the only “major-league” professional sport that was annually competing here.
Losing that is a blow to our state’s sports image.
In Gallatin County, the economic loss is potentially acute.
Morris says Kentucky Speedway has an “industrial revenue bond” that, in lieu of taxes, pays the county around $170,000 annually. The good news is “that (money) should not be affected” by NASCAR’s exit, he says.
However, the track also pays the county “an impact fee based on ticket sales,” Morris said. That is budgeted to produce some $230,000 of revenue for the county government.
Unless the Kentucky Speedway can find other similarly lucrative events to replace the lost NASCAR races, that money may be going away in the next fiscal year.
When I think about Kentucky Speedway’s 10-year life as a Cup Series track, the dominance of Brad Keselowski, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. will be only the second thing to come to mind.
The succession of weird moments that characterized Cup racing in Sparta will come first.
It started with “Car-mageddon” then worked through years with torrential rainfalls, withering heat, a scary wind storm and even a parking-lot fire.
All those zany happenings, it turns out, were only leading up to the gut punch that is the decisions of Speedway Motorsports and NASCAR to leave our state without major-league auto racing.
Kentucky Speedway, seemingly cursed from the start.
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 5:47 PM.
