If California has two Cup dates, why not Las Vegas?

 And from Area 51.....Las Vegas Motor Speedway has a lot of curious action (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
 

   By Mike Mulhern 
   mikemulhern.net

   LAS VEGAS
   You may leave Las Vegas, but Las Vegas never leaves you.
   This is not just another stop for the circus train.
   Andrew Dice Clay, the acerbic comic, says he's trying to put the sin back in Sin City.
   Indeed, this town tries to reinvent itself every four or five years. So wonder what Vegas we'll see here next time around?
   Hey, what Vegas do we have this weekend?
   The first time I saw this town was back in '73 or '74, when – believe it or not – it was a long run of strip malls and strip mall casinos....when Richard Childress and Tim Brewer and the crews would haul coast-to-coast, Carolina to California, via Vegas, and then California to Michigan via Vegas, in Doolies hauling the stockers in Chaparrals.
   Circus Circus, up on the northern end of The Strip, was then the unofficial headquarters for NASCAR teams. That's where Benny Parsons taught me how to play craps, during a short layover between Riverside and Michigan, the next tour stop. And just watching that guy at the table was worth the price of admission.
   Times change, and Vegas has changed, several times in fact. Michael Gaughan's South Point, maybe three hours up I-15 from Fontana's Auto Club Speedway, is now ground-zero for crews....son Brendan, a NASCAR regular for years now, being such a good pitchman.
   It was on the way here, up over the snowy mountains, that we had some time to ponder NASCAR 2010, in these opening days of the new season.
   And those old photos on the back wall of Gaughan's place, of Las Vegas way-back-when – the old Desert Inn, the legendary Sands, the Thunderbird, and the Flamingo, all low-slung ranch-style buildings then with a decidedly more relaxed feel than the current lineup of towering casinos with their golden windows – brought to the fore just how much things have changed.

   The story here today:
   NASCAR sells.
   NASCAR delivers.
   NASCAR fans are loyal.
   All long-held tenets in this sport.
   But just who are NASCAR and its promoters and sponsors selling to?
   And in analyzing the business of NASCAR racing, things aren't always as they may seem.
   Surprise, surprise.
   Ironically, not all of them are marketing/promoting/selling to the same audience.
   Consider the demographics:
   Television networks have one set of target demographics, heavily pushing 18-49s, and on the sports side, skewing logically toward males.
   Sponsors themselves are frequently looking at different demographic sets in NASCAR. Curiously perhaps an unexpected demographic target for some NASCAR sponsors are those few yet key big-decision makers, the ones who make big-ticket buys at major companies, like say for UPS and FedEx, for example. And here's the kicker: many of those big-decision makers in today's business world are women 40-55.
   Puts a different twist on things, eh?
   So how does a David Ragan or Denny Hamlin help seal the deal? Ah, that's the trick.
   The fact that these women – and not the box-of-Tide or box-of-Wheaties group – are frequently key in the demographics picture might come as a surprise.
    And track promoters on the other hand have yet another different set of demographics to reach themselves.
   Here, for example, the target is both 'destination vacationers,' national and international (the NASCAR Japanese target appears way up out here, Toyota perhaps), and fans from around the 'area,' like the steelworkers and construction men who have been a big part of the Vegas boom...and now unfortunately part of the Vegas bust, as can be seen in the many half-built and now-idled construction projects up and down The Strip.

   How can this sport reach such a seemingly disparate audience?
   That's the trick.
   Putting fans in the stands these days is tough work. Even at benchmark Bristol promoter Jeff Byrd will have to go flat-out for his March 21st race. And California's Gillian Zucker, even though she's got some 24 million in the region to hit on, has a rough time of it.
   NASCAR promoters have to work at it (One neat pitch here, 'Danica's Win-Ten-Ten'  -- http://www.lvms.com/tickets/danica/  )
  
   Meanwhile, the TV overnight ratings are in from California's Auto Club Speedway 500, and they're down about five percent from 2009. The race pulled a 5.0; when the rest of the country reports in, later this week, that should rise slightly.
   And Danica Patrick's less than thrilling Saturday Nationwide run at Fontana didn't help things. ESPN reports its ratings for that event we also down, with a final national household rating of 1.7, compared to last year's non-Danica 1.9. ESPN says the broadcast averaged 2.28 million viewers.

   The situation here: Perhaps 70 percent of the weekend race crowd at Las Vegas Motor Speedway will be from the 'destination' set, from out-of-state; the other 30 percent from the region. And with unemployment here around 20 percent, well, many of those are race fans struggling.
   "This is the most challenging year I've had in my 12 years here," LVMS track president Chris Powell says. "But we've got a city behind us (in terms of community support) that people love to come to. This is a great city.
   "However this town has been hit hard."

   Powell is sitting in his office, just across the street from Nellis, where Air Force jockeys are doing their thing, and probably a few strangers from Area 51 too.
    The skies are perfect blue, the weather is a balmy 65 degrees, though a bit windy, spring is in the air...and the surrounding mountains have a beautiful cover of snow.
    And Powell, boss of this speedway at the northern edge of Las Vegas Blvd., is pondering, pondering.
    Everyone in NASCAR, it seems, is pondering.
    Are things finally getting better?

    Bruton Smith, who owns this track, likes to boast about the city's 150,000 hotel rooms. But now, hotels that were once charging $250 a night, on average, have had to drop prices nearly 40 percent.
    Did Vegas, like Daytona Beach, become simply over-built?
    Not necessarily, because before the U.S. economy soured two years ago Las Vegas was attracting 40 million visitors a year. That's nearly one million people a week. Vacations...trade shows...conferences....
   Suddenly it hit, and the drop has been dramatic.
    Not only are fewer vacationers making the trek, but companies dropped many of their Las Vegas forums or seminars, for PR fear of appearing out-of-step with the sluggish economy.
    Wells Fargo, for one example, cancelled a big corporate gathering, and that alone wiped out a whopping 30,000 room nights. Other companies followed suit, and that has cost this town hundreds of millions of dollars.
   

   

   Las Vegas Motor Speedway: If this place 'works,' why not Fontana? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

   

"But this NASCAR weekend will pump more than $150 million into the local economy," Powell says. That's half in gaming, half in non-gaming.
    That's a major plus for the city.
    Indeed, Las Vegas is a special town...and maybe under-utilized by NASCAR, in the grand scheme of things.
   Maybe NASCAR should starting booking two Cup weekends here, to help maximize the sport's impact.
   Yes, there are too many tracks with two Cup weekends, and the sport's season drags on way too long, and maybe only five to eight speedways really, truly deserve two Cup dates. But this place clearly is one of them.
   "We're going to have twice as many people here for Sunday's Cup race as were at the Super Bowl...and that's not even counting our Saturday event," Powell points out.
   Saturday's Danica Patrick 300.
   "This is a big, big weekend for this town," Powell went on. "Yes, it's big for the Speedway, of course, but it's a huge weekend for this city.
   "We're going to be close to a full. It will look very good."
   Pre-race ticket sales – always a key indicator – are up some 98 percent over the past seven weeks (2010 from 2009), and that's a huge boost. Credit NASCAR's 'Boys, have at it,' marketing pitch, and the 'change' mantra. But there has clearly been a good pre-season boost for the sport.
    "We're going to have a hell of a crowd here Sunday afternoon," Powell says.
   To promote the event Powell has negotiated with a dozen hotels for special NASCAR rates, up to 30 percent off. And that was something hotels here wouldn't even think of doing when times were good.
   And I-15 (up parallel to The Strip) is now much wider, five lanes, and less a traffic jam than for the past 10 years, making hopefully for better traffic flow.

   Now the question is 'Did the California weekend pour cold water on the sizzle?'
  And can Las Vegas make for a rebound?
  Already there is speculation about the future of next weekend's stop at Atlanta. And there there's the weekend off before Bristol. (Why?).
  Then comes Martinsville, which also plays a pivotal role in NASCAR's early-season start...because the off Easter weekend follows.
  NASCAR is already looking at the 2011 tour calendar (which opens with the Feb. 20th Daytona 500). But with Daytona's SpeedWeeks dragging on too long perhaps, it's hard to find a good spot for the tour's second event. Phoenix might be better than California.... but selling hospitality and all the stuff that goes into a NASCAR weekend is a tough row to hoe for any track...which is why Richmond and Rockingham were early-season staples for so long, until repeated bad weather forced rethinking.
  What would a good first five weeks of 2011 look like?

   Perhaps NASCAR needs to consider how to leverage Las Vegas better to the sport's benefit.
   In fact, if Kansas City – a great town, to be sure, but not quite a Vegas – winds up with two Cup weekends in 2011, and Vegas still has only one, well, that might raise some eyebrows.
   A second Vegas Cup weekend might have been just a political game two years ago.
   But not now.
   NASCAR might need Las Vegas as much as Las Vegas may need NASCAR.
   And this is a NASCAR kind of town (though don't look for sports bookies to make much action on the races).
   There appears good affinity here between the town and the sport.
   Yet would a second Cup weekend here perhaps hurt, much as it appears to have hurt California's Auto Club Speedway?
   A second Cup event, whether it's Texas or California, makes it more difficult to promoter either one, with the loss of exclusivity. And NASCAR itself may already be way over-saturating the marketplace.
   Regardless, NASCAR needs to rethink the chase – this season, for example:
   -- the late August night race at Bristol is typically socko....
   -- but then Cup takes a week off, while Nationwide plays at Montreal (and it's still unclear just how NASCAR-Montreal is to be marketed)...
   -- then Cup comes back with the Richmond 'race-to-the-chase' finale, typically socko...
   -- but then the first two chase races are at Dover, Del., and Loudon, N.H., both sellout events, 100,000-strong, yet both at tracks which don't have quite the national 'zing' of a Daytona or Vegas or Talladega.
   Perhaps moving Indianapolis's Brickyard 400 to a more prominent and important point in the schedule, from its current late July date, should be considered.
   
   Getting sponsorships isn't getting any easier either.
   Everyone has to be more creative.
  All of which may make Las Vegas even more important to NASCAR.
   Perhaps never has NASCAR been so important to this town than right now, with the slump in tourism and the severe cutbacks in conventions, and the trying times for the construction industry here. (One reason for moving the sport's December awards banquet here.)
   Hey, what a great place to pitch for the start of the 2011 championship chase in early fall. (And there is a good argument to be made about reshaping the chase, changing up the tracks, and indeed making for a hotter September start to the playoffs...)

   These two tracks, California's Auto Club Speedway (ACS) and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, may be barely three hours apart, and just a few days distant race-to-race. But they're like two different worlds.
    And the question each spring is why does Las Vegas Motor Speedway work so much better than Auto Club Speedway? 
    ACS, it could be argued, is on the wrong side of Los Angeles, too from the Hollywood heart of LA, too far from San Diego. It could also be argued that ACS doesn't have that tight relationship with the local community that, say, Talladega does, or Bristol, or Daytona. And Fontana of course isn't quite the destination that Vegas is.
   Yes, Bristol isn't really a 'destination' either, but its track action is typically some of the wildest on the tour. Same for Talladega.
   The argument can be made that NASCAR's Sprint Cup tour is made up of 'national' events, 'regional' events, and special events like Bristol and Talladega.
   Las Vegas is clearly one of the national events, with fans from all 50 states.
   NASCAR's LA stop should be more than what it is, most would agree.
   But Vegas appears to work quite well.
   Leverage that, would appear the logical move for Daytona.  
  
  

    

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   Las Vegas: no place on the NASCAR tour quite like this place (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)