NASCAR Tracks Find Innovative Ways to Entice Racing Fans

The 6-foot vinyl fencing has been erected, the closed-circuit TV lines to the private patios are being installed, and the wireless infrastructure is all but complete.

All that remains at Burnout Alley, the luxury motor-coach compound overlooking the backstretch of Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, is a bit of landscaping before the April 2-5 NASCAR weekend.

That's when a few dozen stock car racing fans, who will pay $15,000 a year for the privilege, will pull their million-dollar motor coaches trackside to take in NASCAR's ear-splitting sounds from their own 30-by-60-foot gated compound while cooking T-bones on the patio, watching the action on flat-screen TVs, ordering groceries from a custom shopping list (delivery included) and, if the occasion warrants, asking the concierge service to order flowers and make dinner reservations.

Similar digs will soon be available at Lowe's Motor Speedway just north of Charlotte. Included in the deal at both tracks are 10 tickets and VIP pit-road passes for three race weekends each season.

While both projects entail new construction, they don't represent a building boom quite so much as a "re-purposing." Both are taking shape where grandstands have been razed for lack of demand.

Five years ago, those grandstands were full. But as economic conditions have worsened, more and more of those seats have been going unsold -- an embarrassing affirmation that hard times have come to NASCAR, once the country's fastest growing sport.

While other tracks have slashed ticket prices, Texas Motor Speedway took the radical step of tearing down 21,000 seats -- more than 13 percent of its 159,000-seat capacity. It's the sports-marketing equivalent of plowing under crops in response to a troubled economy and, in this case, planting something with greater cash potential.

"There's a much bigger thing at play here than creating spots to put motor coaches in," says Eddie Gossage, president of Texas Motor Speedway. "It's about marketing, finance and economics. With the economy being what it is, we're trying to find ways to have some contraction -- yet not on the revenue side. We're constantly playing with the formula of supply and demand."

All sports are struggling at the box office these days.

After its member schools failed to sell their allotment of tickets to the Atlantic Coast Conference men's basketball tournament this month, the league offered them to the general public for the first time since 1966. Still, it ended up with roughly 10,000 unsold seats in Atlanta's Georgia Dome.

The New York Yankees have taken out full-page ads to find buyers for unsold premium seats at their gleaming new baseball palace. The NBA's Detroit Pistons had their 259-game sellout streak at The Palace end in February.

And the long-suffering New Jersey Nets of the NBA have reportedly turned to a seat-filling service that caters to New York theatergoers to expand their audience.