LV to run IRL race during day

Tuesday, April 21, 1998 | 8:35 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

Bowing to pressure from Indy Racing League and television officials, Las Vegas Motor Speedway chairman Richie Clyne has agreed to move the season-ending IRL Las Vegas 500 from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon.

The Las Vegas 500 has been moved from 7 p.m. on Oct. 10 to 1 p.m. (PDT) on Oct. 11. The race will be televised live by The Nashville Network.

The change was made to accommodate IRL fans, said Leo Mehl, executive director of the Pep Boys Indy Racing League.

"A Saturday-night race in Las Vegas would run well past midnight in the East," Mehl told the Associated Press. "Our fans in Eastern time zones can now see our season finale on television without making a night of it."

Clyne echoed Mehl's statement that the decision to move the race to Sunday afternoon was made to accommodate race fans.

"Running this event on Sunday afternoon rather than Saturday night works better for everyone involved," Clyne said. "Because so much is going on at night in Las Vegas, we feel that holding the race on Sunday afternoon presents a better opportunity for our fans to attend."

After last year's Las Vegas 500 drew only an estimated 30,000 fans to the 107,000-seat superspeedway, IRL president Tony George expressed his displeasure with the sparse crowd and said at the time that "changes would be made."

The inaugural IRL race at LVMS in 1996 drew more than 67,000 fans on a Sunday afternoon, although sources have indicated that many of the tickets were given away. George hinted that the move to Saturday night last year was a mistake.

"I was a little disappointed that the crowd wasn't any bigger than it was," George said immediately after race. "I think there are a lot of things that probably contributed to that."

George also was upset at what he viewed as the speedway's lack of pre-race publicity.

"I think anything in Las Vegas is hard to get a handle on how you sell it, how your promote it," George said. "I'm not sure anybody knows that -- they think they know it, but I'm not sure they do."

Shortly before last October's Las Vegas 500, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor's Authority came on board as the title sponsor of the race.

An IRL official told the SUN said that the LVCVA stepped in too late last year to put its vast resources to work publicizing the 1997 race, but was optimistic that the Authority's advertising "muscle" would have an enormous effect on this year's event.