NASCAR to return to Vegas next year

Tuesday, March 3, 1998 | 9:41 a.m.

It won't be official until later this month, but the NASCAR Winston Cup Series will make a return trip to Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 1999.

Richie Clyne, chairman of the $200 million speedway, said Monday that tickets for the 1999 Las Vegas Winston Cup race will go on sale in April.

"We're going to put tickets on sale next month and as soon as we do, there will be a whole new ticket policy that will take care of the people who supported us right from the beginning," Clyne said, adding that fans who bought tickets for Sunday's inaugural Las Vegas 400 will have priority in purchasing tickets for next year's race.

Sunday's Las Vegas 400, won by Mark Martin, sold out all 107,000 grandstand seats in less than 30 hours, with an estimated 82 percent of those tickets going to out-of-state fans.

While Clyne said that NASCAR's officials were pleased with the track's performance for its first Winston Cup date, he said his primary concern was taking care of his paying customers.

"The response was all positive," Clyne said of NASCAR. "I got nothing but great reviews from the NASCAR people about how great the city was.

"The two monkeys that came off my back were the weather and traffic. The traffic, I credit NDOT (Nevada Department of Transportation) and Metro and Highway Patrol for making everything run smoothly. We all sat down and put together a hell of a program and we all worked together as a team and it worked just slick. Those were really the only concerns I had."

Clyne acknowledged there were some "minor glitches" in staging the largest sporting event in Nevada history. But he said the overwhelming response from spectators who attended Sunday's race was positive.

"I got piles and piles and piles of faxes this morning and hundreds of phone call messages of congratulations from all over the world," Clyne said. "The biggest thing I got was from not only the NASCAR officials and the teams but the fans themselves, saying how polite the town was.

"That was probably the biggest compliment I got, was how polite the city was to them, that the waiters and waitresses were nice, the bartenders were nice -- even the taxicabs were nice and clean. My main job was to have everybody go home happy ... and obviously we did the job because everybody was going home happy."

There were some snags in the weekend, from long lines at the rest rooms to delays in the CAT shuttle buses that brought spectators to the track from downtown and The Strip. Some fans had to wait as long as an hour for buses that were supposed to be running every 15 minutes.

"There are always glitches (but) they were extremely minor," Clyne said. "We had staff meetings this morning and went over all our punch lists from the weekend. There will definitely be some changes made but they'll be minor, to keep the fan happy and keep the people coming back.

"The major problem we had was with the rest rooms. Even though we put in twice as many as we needed, we're going to put in another several big blocks of rest rooms because there was a backup during a couple different portions of the race. We met with the architects this morning and that problem is going to be corrected immediately."

Clyne was especially relieved that most fans heeded the advice of traffic planners to arrive early and stay late to avoid massive traffic gridlock on Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard -- the only two access routes to and from the track.

"If it wasn't for NDOT, Metro and Highway Patrol, it would never have worked as smooth as it did," Clyne said. "The plans they came up with worked perfectly so I credit all the traffic solutions to those three entities.

"All in all, it was a wonderful success for the city."

So much so that Clyne said he can't wait to do it all again in 51 weeks.