January 15, 2009
By Doug Demmons
Where have you gone Humpy Wheeler? NASCAR Nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
The NASCAR price war has begun as tracks realize that those empty seats from last year are not going to fill up with fans eager to see if enough cars show up to fill the 43-car field. It’s clearance sale time and before long tracks might be paying you just to show up.
OK, it’s not that bad. But it should be clear that the recently announced ticket discount programs at several NASCAR tracks won’t fill the grandstands this year.
Track officials are normally loathe to lower the price of tickets, even when thousands of fans show up disguised as empty seats. The reason is simple -- it makes it harder later on, when the economy turns around, to raise your prices again.
Tracks would prefer to give you free hot dogs or face time with drivers or a garage pass or a hunk of asphalt dipped in bronze. Anything but a lower price.
But that was last year. This year the smell of desperation is in the air. Empty seats do not buy T-shirts or hot dogs or beer and do not bolster the fan base, So prices are tumbling. Darlington, Richmond, Talladega, Texas, Daytona and Auto Club Speedway have all announced discounted tickets. And they won’t be the last tracks to do so.
But the deals don’t go far enough. The discounts are often for the lesser desirable seats. At Talladega, for instance, the new $40 seats are in the sections of the frontstretch grandstand near Turn 4 that were quite sparse with spectators for the fall race.
The deals will attract some new customers who might have otherwise stayed home, but they are just as likely to attract folks who had previously bought more expensive seats and have decided to try to save a few bucks.
Stores at Christmas offered unheard-of discounts just to get people to come through the doors. And still it was the worst Christmas for sales in a long time. And to some degree it backfired because with so many discounts at so many stores, no one was willing to buy anything that wasn’t at least 30 percent off.
So don’t be surprised if a NASCAR price war breaks out. Don’t be surprised if other tracks start price slashing just to stay in the hunt for those fans who attend several races a year.
If you were planning on going to five or six races this year, you’d probably think twice about going to a track that was offering nothing beyond the same deal you got last year. You might skip the Atlanta race, for instance, in favor of one of those $40 Talladega seats.
Or, you might just take a wait-and-see approach, much like the Christmas shopper who waits because he is certain prices will fall even more as the holiday draws near and people get really desperate.
And this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s about time.
It has become a major financial ordeal these days to take your family to a NASCAR race or a Major League Baseball game or an NFL game. When you add up the price of tickets, concessions, parking, souvenirs, gas and meals you almost need a second mortgage.
Dropping the price of tickets helps, but it’s not going to be enough -- not this year. Cutting prices on the low-rent seats won’t cut it. More freebies won’t convince people to watch the race live rather than on TV.
Far more radical measures are called for -- like cutting prices across the board on seats. Like giving away more than hot dogs. How about gift cards to local merchants?
And how about pressuring hotels and motels to stop gouging race fans? Hard to enforce, you say? Maybe. But what if NASCAR said the average per-night rate of hotel rooms in each host city would be taken into consideration when the new schedule is drawn up? What if a city with ridiculously high hotel rates faced the prospect of losing one of its two races to a city with cheap rates?
What if a track like Kentucky Speedway could enhance its chance of getting a Cup race by persuading local hotels to slash room rates?
What we would have then would be a competition for the credit card signatures of race fans. God forbid, we might actually have capitalism!
It is no longer enough to depend on the history and mystique of NASCAR to sell tickets. The sport and the fan base have moved beyond that. It’s going to take ingenuity and moxy.
Will tracks lose money doing things like this? Absolutely. But it’s better to lose a little money one year in order to keep your loyal customers on board. You don’t want fans to decide that watching the race on TV is an acceptable substitute.
It’s going to be the Golden Age of Promoters.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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