Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: Speedway changes not all so hot

Friday, Aug. 6, 1999 | 10:31 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at bh@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4089.

When Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency in 1980, one of the questions he asked Americans was "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

The answer, according to most of the electorate, was "no," and Reagan was whisked into office.

It has been eight months since Bruton Smith purchased Las Vegas Motor Speedway so, with apologies to the former President, it seems like a fair time to ask the question "Are Las Vegas racing fans better off than they were a year ago?"

There is no question Smith, and his Speedway Motorsports Inc., empire, have put some nice finishing touches on the $200 million facility that Richie Clyne built in the North Las Vegas desert. Structurally, the Speedway is more fan-friendly than it was a year ago, with additional entrances and rest rooms, and the promise of easier traffic access to be put in place in time for next year's annual NASCAR Winston Cup race.

SMI also has landed a National Hot Rod Association national event and will complete construction on the unfinished drag strip.

But it has been a couple other, less-publicized (by SMI, anyway) decisions by Smith that have left local racing enthusiasts wondering if Clyne and his associates weren't so bad after all.

First, Speedway officials decided to examine the tracks's ticket-pricing policy and determined more than a handful of seats -- the majority, actually, in the main grandstand -- were underpriced and increased prices by an average of $12 per ticket.

(Ticket prices for seats in the less-desirable Section 4, however, were lowered by an average of $7 per ticket and some seats in the main grandstand also were lowered by $5 per ticket.)

Secondly, Smith found out that Clyne had built the grandstand seating to allow for 20 inches per seat -- a luxury not found at other major-league racing facilities -- and decided to go with the "industry standard" of 18 inches per seat. This will allow Smith to cram about 10,000 more people into the same amount of space -- and net Smith and SMI about $1 million more per Winston Cup event.

Finally, because SMI is a publicly traded company that has to answer to its shareholders, the Speedway elected to dump one of its less popular (and less profitable) events, the American Motorcyclist Association Superbike races. Although the Superbike races were not well-attended in their first three appearances at LVMS, Clyne gave the two-wheeled road racers a spectacular venue to hold their season-ending race and expose local race fans to a form of motor sports that previously was unavailable in Southern Nevada.

Smith, whose roots are in NASCAR stock cars, also has dragged his feet at the opportunity to land a Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) race in Las Vegas, even though a similar race in nearby Fontana, Calif., last year drew more than 100,000 spectators.

The reason? Smith apparently is put off by CART's estimated $2.5 million sanctioning fee and the fact that CART does not share its television revenue with the tracks (unlike NASCAR).

Such a bottom-line-conscious approach was non-existent under the previous ownership, and Bill Bennett and Ralph Englestad still were able to pull $28 million in cash out of the Speedway before they sold it to Smith.

Are local racing fans better off than they were a year ago?

The returns still are coming in.