Columnist Ron Kantowski: LVMS: One race is plenty

Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003 | 10:14 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's insider notes column appears Tuesday and his Page One column appears Thursday. He can be reached at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

As a steady Tuesday rain threatened to turn their place of employment into something more suitable to duck hunting than major league auto racing, two frantic Las Vegas Motor Speedway workers paused to catch an elevator in the administration building.

"How's it goin'?" said the one carting boxes of UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 media guides.

"Oh, you know," said the other one, his walkie-talkie cackling with unintelligible instructions from an infield command post. "I'll be glad when Monday comes."

If the weatherman cooperates, all that will remain of Las Vegas' annual NASCAR Winston Cup race by then is enough empty beer cans to start an aluminum plant.

But I've got news for the man on the hand truck and walkie-talkie guy. With NASCAR talking about shuffling its maxed-out schedule to accommodate cash cow tracks such as ours as early as next year, their jobs one day could include two major headaches.

Of course, that development is contingent upon track owner Bruton Smith getting his way with NASCAR, and that happens with the frequency of Jimmy Spencer's car being loaded onto the transporter in its entirety.

But one of these days, the France family, which controls NASCAR, may stop treating Smith as a rival and grant him permission to print more money -- i.e., award a second race to LVMS or Texas Motor Speedway, an even bigger Smith gold mine that tolerates nearly 200,000 speed freaks.

Rockingham, N.C., and Darlington, S.C., situated just 50 miles apart, most likely will be first to lose one of their two Winston Cup dates. Geography is an issue but a bigger one is attendance, as both tracks have trouble filling their modest 60,000-seat grandstands once, much less twice per year.

Unfortunately for local race fans, Rockingham and Darlington are owned by the France family, which almost certainly would steer those races to one of their more lucrative tracks, such as Kansas City, Chicagoland or California.

To you and I, this may seem like a conflict of interest. In NASCAR, it's just a blueprint for doing business. Maybe Darrell Waltrip or Benny Parsons will explain to me how NASCAR can get away with it. That is, if the Supreme Court doesn't do it first.

Having said that, let's change gears. Even if Las Vegas were to get a second race, I'm not so sure it would be as successful as the one we've got. In fact, it might even detract from it.

Three-quarters of the 140,000 LVMS spectators who sit in traffic on race day come from somewhere else, which means two things: They don't know where to get a cheap beer and because of it, they probably have been saving all year just to make this trip.

Would they be able to set aside enough discretionary dollars for two Las Vegas junkets? Considering you don't find tasselled loafers in a typical NASCAR infield, I doubt it. But you will find a lot of Chevy Tahoes and Ford F-150s that aren't yet paid for. This ain't Formula One.

For that matter, I'm not sure how many local fans would pony up the cash for two Winston Cup races. The cheapest race day ticket at LVMS is $58, the most expensive $223. But there are many more seats in the Bellagio section than at the P.T. Pub level. And let's not forget that our one race didn't sell out until just a couple of weeks ago.

I've heard more than one person this week describe the NASCAR race as our Super Bowl.

There can be only one of those every year.