Tighter weekend at the track may just fly
HAMPTON, Ga. -- I am writing from an empty media center, beside an empty garage area, at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Which is the way the garage area and media center should be, on a Friday, before a Sunday NASCAR race.
The Pep Boys 500 weekend has been condensed, to make common sense. This should be the future of NASCAR weekends: practice and qualify on Saturday, race on Sunday and be done with it.
"We haven't launched into a two-day schedule forevermore," AMS president Ed Clark cautioned me Friday. "This is kind of an experiment."
The track isn't completely deserted. A few promotional events are going on. That's OK.
But the people who need and deserve to stay home get to stay home and save money.
Friday night alone saves teams thousands of dollars each in hotel bills and meals. But far more importantly, travel-frazzled crewmen get one more precious night at home with their families. You can't imagine just how precious until and unless you've spent 38 long weekends on the road.
These people have been pushed beyond the limits for years. They need some relief; not just here but circuit-wide.
The opportunity is there for drivers to get some relief too, but knowing them, they'll just use the extra day for more paid promotional appearances and continue to grouse about how busy their travel schedules are.
Currently it costs teams anywhere from $300,000 to $600,000 per car -- that's right, per car -- to go to a race, just one race. Cutting a fraction of that is the least NASCAR, and especially the tracks, could do for them.
For the fans, Saturday becomes more of a bargain; again, the least NASCAR and the tracks could do for them.
The "experiment" is based largely on the still-troubled economy, but "the biggest thing, we thought, was if you put qualifying with the Nationwide Series [race and qualifying] into one day, and the fans had to buy only one ticket, you potentially will entice more people to come," Clark said. "We'll find out tomorrow, I guess."
But early indications are good. Clark said Nationwide race sales are up 30 percent over last year, and that "we expect a huge walk-in" -- that is, fans who decide at the last minute to come, then just walk up and buy tickets at the track.
Fridays have largely been wasted in recent years on the Cup tour, because qualifying -- virtually meaningless nowadays in NASCAR -- rarely if ever draws a significant crowd at any track.
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"Until we start putting some pizzazz into what pole qualifying is -- a single car going around the track with 35 guys [the top 35 in points] locked into the field, I don't see where anybody's going to do tremendously well with pole qualifying," Clark said.
Atlanta's Saturday will be long and frantic, with practice and qualifying for both Cup and Nationwide, followed by the Nationwide race in the evening.
But the fans not only get a bargain; they get what they really love the most: a marathon of activity.
An aside to the nitpickers, lest you start e-mailing me that Indianapolis qualifies on Saturday for the Allstate 400: There are major differences. Indy holds practice on Fridays and demands driver availability to the media, so there's no break for the teams. Plus, Indy doesn't have any support races on Saturdays, so there's no bargain package for the fans.
So this is the prototype for condensing Sunday race weekends, the only real analogy being at Bristol, Tenn., in August, where they run Cup qualifying and the Nationwide race on Friday and the Cup race on Saturday night.
Two-day weekends are just the logical evolution in the more automated, more mobile NASCAR. But is it really the wave of the future?
"I think it's been the wave for a while to shorten things up as much as you can," Clark said. "I don't know how much shorter it could be."
But I hope his experiment works, in the form of a solid crowd Saturday. If tracks can make more money by dragging out weekends, they'll do it. If they can make more money shortening weekends, they'll do that.
When I started covering NASCAR, they qualified on Thursday for Sunday races, and for the old Labor Day races at Darlington, they qualified on Thursday for a Monday race.
The reason for qualifying so early was to generate news in the local media and promote late ticket sales in an era when advance sales weren't much. Qualifying dragged over two- and three-day periods.
And to be sure, those protracted weekends were a media dream.
Top drivers made it into the field the first day, and were pretty much free -- except for practice -- until the race. We had all the access in the world to the Richard Pettys, David Pearsons, Bobby Allisons, Cale Yarboroughs and Darrell Waltrips.
And so here, now, I'm by no means angling for easier weekends for the media. The opposite is true. Fridays are good for gathering stories. With Saturday-Sunday activity only, drivers, crew chiefs and team owners would have far less time to deal with media.
My motives here are purely objective, purely commonsense: saving money for teams and giving fans more value -- in keeping with NASCAR's two mantras in this economy -- and saving the sanity of overworked, over-traveled crewmen and engineers.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.
