Saturday night, I watched an historic race. It wasn't historic in the sense that anything remarkable happened, that some record was finally broken, or that some unlikely winner stumbled into Victory Lane at the end of the night. Instead, it was most likely the final time one of NASCAR's top series will visit the track, ending a tradition stretching back to 1982. And don't get me wrong, if I thought history were marching in the right direction, I wouldn't be so melancholy over this move.
But I'm unconvinced.
Regardless of the names it's held in the last few seasons, the track outside Indianapolis, Indiana will always be Indianapolis Raceway Park to me. (It may be, yet again; after the announcement a few weeks ago, supposedly Lucas Oil is reconsidering their naming rights.) IRP was never to be confused with the larger, more prestigious Indianapolis Motor Speedway a few miles away. Instead, it was a proving ground, hosting minor-league stock car and open-wheel races and showcasing dragsters on the adjacent quarter-mile drag strip. The kids who cut their teeth wheeling midget cars around IRP harbored hopes of, one day, being asked to drive an IndyCar around the Brickyard. Some, like Jeff Gordon and Ryan Newman, ended up fulfilling those dreams in NASCAR instead.
But not all that long ago, the worlds of NASCAR and Indy rarely intersected. There were a few drivers who made the transition now and then; Mario Andretti was an Indy driver who won a race or two in NASCAR, and others like Tom Sneva would try their fortunes in stock cars while making a career in open-wheel racing. But the closest NASCAR teams would come to racing their "taxi cabs" at the Brickyard would be a string of races in the 1970s at the now-closed Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California, a near-carbon-copy of the rectangular Indy layout that was shuttered in 1980.
A few miles outside of Indianapolis, though, sat the short track in Clermont, Indiana. And while the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was too prestigious to allow anything but Indy cars on the pavement, Indianapolis Raceway Park was a good fit for the Busch Series, not all that far removed from the short-track Sportsman division of years past. IRP had a date on the inaugural Busch Series schedule in 1982, with Morgan Shepherd taking the checkers that year.
Since then, IRP has held a summer date on the Busch schedule. For years, it was another stand-alone showcase date for the Busch Series teams to strut their stuff on the familiar short tracks. Then, in 1993, rumblings were heard of the unthinkable, a stock-car race on the hallowed Brickyard. In 1994, talk became reality with the inaugural Brickyard 400. The Saturday spectacle drew eighty-five cars, teams from the Winston Cup ranks as well as hopeful visitors from the ARCA and Winston West Series, all hoping to be among the forty-three drivers who would be first to race a stock car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Down the road a bit from Indianapolis, the Busch Series teams convened for what was now a Friday-night prelude to the Brickyard 400. The NASCAR SuperTruck Series would join the pre-race Indy festivities in its first full season in 1995, with a Thursday-evening preamble to the Brickyard 400.
And such was the role of IRP. Trucks two nights before the Brickyard 400, Busch the night before, and sprint cars thrown in wherever they might fit. While the media circus revolved around days of practice, qualifying, the IROC Series and eventually the Brickyard 400, real no-holds-barred short-track racing held court at IRP.
And then, as happens often these days, rumors started to fly that NASCAR was looking to move the Nationwide Series race from IRP to IMS, as a true support event for the Brickyard 400. The speculation revolved mostly around the assumption that NASCAR wanted to bring its two premier series to IMS to bolster the Brickyard 400's image. Since 1994, the Brickyard 400 has undoubtedly been one of NASCAR's marquée events, if only for the sheer prestige of racing at Indianapolis. The race itself has often been dull, the result of racing stock cars on a flat track designed a hundred years ago for testing Indy cars. In 2008, the race was a disaster, with unprecedented tire wear forcing NASCAR to throw frequent competition cautions so teams could change tires. Add the wildcard of a tough economy that has opened vacancies in the grandstands of traditional sell-outs like Bristol and New Hampshire, and it's easy to see the factors that keep the Indianapolis grandstands emptier than anyone would care to see. But for years, think of how we heard that Bruton Smith was buying tracks so he could start his own rival stock-car circuit. Speculation is only speculation until the press releases hit the airwaves.
And a few weeks before this year's Brickyard weekend, the press release hit the airwaves. The 2012 Super Weekend at the Brickyard, as it's being billed, will feature two Grand-Am Road Racing events on Friday, the Nationwide Series on Saturday, and the Sprint Cup Crown Royal 400 on Sunday. The press release promises "non-stop racing excitement" on both the oval (for the NASCAR races) and road-course (for the Grand-Am series) layouts, a first for Indy on the same weekend. The press release proclaims this to be a great new tradition of racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The press release touts all of this as a "great value for the fan."
Somehow, the excitement of close-quarters competition, the tradition of thirty years at IRP, and the value of seeing a better race at a fraction of the ticket price were all forgotten when that press release was typed.
I just don't see this being a winning move for anyone. From the standpoint of NASCAR's and IMS' goals of raising the prestige of the weekend and selling more seats, I think this will result in a minor increase if anything at all. First, we're talking about NASCAR's highest division racing at one of the most famous oval tracks in the world. There's little that will elevate opinion of the Brickyard 400, er, Crown Royal 400 any more than its current plateau. It's not as if there weren't already support races in place for the Brickyard 400, even if they were held at other tracks. As for selling more tickets, is it that likely that an undercard series and an unrelated road-racing series are going to drive more ticket sales for the Cup race? Many fans buying tickets for Nationwide races do so because they're diehard fans who are already going to Sunday's race, or they can't afford Sunday tickets and opt for the cheaper of the two events. Neither of those alternatives can guarantee more ticket sales. And even if twice as many fans buy IMS Nationwide tickets as bought tickets for this year's Kroger 200 at IRP, imagine how empty the grandstands at Indy will look with forty or fifty thousand fans in the seats. Those empty seats won't justify an Indy race date for very long.
And from the standpoint of the competitors, this move seems equally ill-advised. The Nationwide/Busch race at IRP served as a reminder of what the series was all about, providing a step up from local and regional racing for capable drivers, and offering a step up to the big leagues for the most talented of those drivers. The short tracks were part of the Nationwide Series' identity, a familiar scene for drivers gaining experience with the larger tracks, and more suitable for teams with modest resources. Some of those tracks were "outgrown" in the '90s due to unsafe pit areas for the teams, but IRP has kept up with the times. By moving this race, we're trading an exciting, challenging short track race for a dull event on a track the likes of which many of the drivers have never even seen before. This makes it nearly certain that one of the visiting Cup drivers (probably Kyle Busch, as many are talking of limited schedules in the Nationwide Series next year) will come away with the trophy and prize money. About the only benefit to the teams and drivers may be the privilege of racing at Indianapolis at all.
The same thing happened years ago in Nashville. The Nationwide Series and Truck Series (and, before the mid-eighties, the Winston Cup Series as well) raced for years at the famed Nashville Motor Speedway, a short track nestled in downtown Nashville. In 2001, the track was replaced on the schedule by the modern Nashville Superspeedway, a one-and-a-third-mile concrete tri-oval just outside of town. By all accounts, the new speedway was more modern and surely a nicer facility than the downtown bullring. But the grandstands never filled out over ten years of racing, and just this week as I was penning this entry, Dover Motorsports announced they would not sanction any 2012 races at Nashville Superspeedway. The Fairgrounds track, which has changed ownership, management and names more times than I can remember, clings to life, but probably outside of the scope of NASCAR's big three series.
That's why I feel like writing IRP off the schedule, trading the classic short-track racing for a little more name recognition, is a mistake. I want to say that this idea probably made sense in the mythical NASCAR boardroom, evaluated by executives with calculators and spin doctors weaving fantasies of attendance numbers. But at the same time, I look back at what happened with Nashville, and I can't help but wonder how anyone could think it was a good plan with such a recent counterexample to judge by. With a marquée event like the Brickyard 400, support races are not the answer to ticket sales. I think the answer is more likely to fall between the poor economy, lackluster racing, and a general "down" cycle for the sport.
Moving this race to Indianapolis Motor Speedway is symbolic of the same kind of creative destruction that impacted the Craftsman Truck Series in its early years. At first, the Trucks were a third-tier national series, designed to be friendly to the relatively low-buck team. There were no "hot pits;" teams would have a halftime break to make adjustments or tire changes. This saved teams from paying for professional pit crews, and allowed the series to stop at small tracks that did not have formal pit roads, visiting a number of markets for which the Busch Series and Winston Cup Series were just too large. Many teams made it through the first season with one or two trucks, a few key pit crew members, and a lean budget. But after a few years, after the early championships had been won by teams with Cup-level resources, the Trucks started visiting larger tracks, and soon exchanged their halftime breaks for hot pit-stops. Old favorites like I-70 Speedway in Missouri, Mesa Marin Raceway in California and Flemington Speedway in New Jersey fell off the schedule, and more dates fell in line with Cup and Busch Series races at the same tracks. It elevated the profile of the series, but at a price to some of the early series staples, and a price to the series' identity.
And so the Nationwide Series exchanges a classic short-track staple for a higher-profile date, another speedway race to tax the resources of the teams without a Sprint Cup ringer behind the wheel. We're being told it's an answer. If it's an answer, though, I think it's an answer to a question that was never even asked in the first place.
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