Just in case you hadn't heard, NASCAR has felt a little bit of impact from this whole downturn thing in the economy -- and this weekend's race at Chicagoland Speedway certainly won't be any different.In fact, the track is likely going to miss out on a sellout of the grandstand tickets for just the second time since the Sprint Cup Series started coming to the 1.5-miler in a suburb of Chicago some 45 miles away from downtown in 2001.
Fortunately, the track made a smart move a year ago by installing lights for nighttime racing and this week acknowledged an even better change might be made for 2010 concerning the currently idiotic way to buy tickets from the track.
Loyal readers -- all 3 of you -- may have remembered last year when yours truly spent the weekend in Joliet for the Cup race, and even then with a sellout ready to see the 2008 edition of the 400-miler, I pondered what the track might be losing thanks to its ticketing process.
You see, in order to have a grandstand ticket in your possession bought strictly from the speedway for Saturday night's race, you'd have to buy a "Track Pack" at a minimum price of $195. This pack actually is a pretty good deal because you get something like five races for the price, but only two during the NASCAR weekend. The remaining three are the IndyCar, Camping World Truck and ARCA Seres hosted later in the summer.
In other words, every seat at Chicagoland Speedway is a season ticket -- which makes it great for when the IndyCar series comes to town because they can tecnically say they sold the same amount of tickets as NASCAR did in the Chicago market.
In my post a year ago, I wondered if the 75,000 seats the track has (small for NASCAR standards) is too small of a goal for the track and that if they offered 100,000 or 125,000 seats in a manner where a fan -- or a casual observer wanting to see NASCAR for the first time with the family -- could walk up and buy tickets to a race that didn't run them $200 a piece.
After all, a big goal of coming to the Chicago market was to expand the fan base there to help draw more coverage to the sport from the large media market that is the Windy City. But come on, if you've never seen NASCAR before -- what does a $200 ticket for other races you don't care about say to you?
It says NASCAR is too expensive for the common person, when in reality, its a sport thats built around that person.
Obviously, there's not been a whole lot of good come out of the economic downturn, but in Chicago and other NASCAR markets, its likely going to make racing a whole lot more affordable for fan who wants to check out the action. In fact, the new track president at Chicagoland, Craig Rust, even said so himself in a story by the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week.
"We need to do everything we can to get back to a sellout in 2010," Rust said. "The Track Pack provides a lot of value when you look at it. But that's something that needs to be looked at."
His boss and International Speedway Corporation president John Saunders agreed that the ISC-owned facility, in addition to the other tracks in the ISC portfolio, will likely see changes in ticket policy for 2010.
"I anticipate for the next year that at certain events we will unbundle ticket packages, as well as adjust prices in other sections of the facilities beyond just the entry-level tickets," Saunders said. "This is a high priority of our management team, to optimize attendance and revenue generation in what we expect will continue to be a challenging economic environment."
For starters, I'd recommend selling a few more event-specific tickets and allowing fans to bring coolers into the grandstands at places like Chicagoland that ban them. There'll always be that frugal fan who wants to save money, while at the same time, there's the fan -- and probably two times as many of these ones -- that doesn't care to haul a cooler into the track and will spend money on the high-priced concession food.
Finally, it seems like Chicagoland is on track to becoming much more friendly to the cost-concious fan, and as I bet they'll find out, their attendance and tickets sales could swing up dramatically in 2010 just with the implication of some friendlier ticket packages and guest policies.
