Columnist Dean Juipe: Speedway has lost a few fans

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, March 8, 2000 | 10:33 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@vegas.com or 259-4084.

The aftermath stories have all painted such a rosy picture, as if there were no complaints beyond a general dissatisfaction with the weather.

To hear the executives tell it, it was quite a weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Sure, it rained and cut short Sunday's main event, but, they said, traffic problems were minimized and everyone went home a winner.

Well, as you may have already gathered, those congenial assessments rang hollow to many, if not most, of the 61,000 who attended Saturday's events and the 130,000 who took in the NASCAR race the following day.

For those people, whether they were relying on mass transit or their own automobiles to make it to the track, Las Vegas was anything but a pleasant experience.

Having had an old friend come to town for the specific purpose of taking in the race with his wife and two other couples, let it be known that there are at least six people who won't be back.

They like racing and they're big NASCAR fans who annually travel to two or three tracks for races similar to the CarsDirect.com 400 that was here. They've been to Las Vegas before but never to the track, and although they thought the facility was wonderful they've already decided that Las Vegas will no longer be a part of their racing itinerary.

It's hard to say what irritated them more: the traffic or the LVMS concession prices.

They felt gouged on the latter and abandoned on the former.

Forewarned, as everyone was, to leave early for the track, they did manage to get there on time both days. So that wasn't too bad and the track official who boasted that the stands were packed for each day's green flag apparently was right.

But at the track they were subjected to limited concession choices -- Budweiser, for instance, was the only beer available -- and nasty prices. Not having a taste for Bud, they skipped the beer and dug deep for a hot dog.

Annoying as that was, it was nothing compared to leaving the speedway Saturday and not seeing a CAT bus in sight. Oh, there had been a battalion of buses, but they all left after the Busch race and failed to take into account that several thousand fans stayed for the NASCAR "Happy Hour" where Sunday's drivers come out to get a feel for the track.

Eventually another battalion of buses arrived to soothe the increasingly hostile crowd. Nonetheless a relatively short journey took forever, and in the case of these people the trip was extended an additional hour when two of the buses traded paint and the drivers became involved in near fisticuffs.

One of the Ralph Kramdens went so far as to bust his fellow driver's front window, a move which caused the other driver to put her bus out of commission and summon a supervisor.

Sunday, they said, was marginally better and was aided by the bus route going through Nellis Air Force Base, yet they deemed the trek far too tedious to ever try again.

Factor in the bridge work being done at Cheyenne and I-15 that pinched the freeway to two lanes and plenty of people found legitimate reason for complaint.

The bottom line: While track officials say they won't be resting on their laurels, some fans left exasperated. And those that were won't be back to see if the situation ever improves.