Abandoned Racetracks - Dark Clouds On The Horizon

Jerry Smith of Ohio's Mansfield Motor Speedway says that on weekends of the Nextel Cup races on Saturday nights "I could probably make more money if I just told our drivers to stay home and I set up big screens in the infield and broadcast the Cup race live. Those night races can hurt us that much."

"It's a tough business," says Stewart Doty, who publishes Race Promoters Monthly, a trade journal for track operators. "But I don't think it is any tougher than most other small businesses. Nationally, about 21 percent of small businesses fail each year, and short-track operators are holding at about that rate."

But he says that U.S. race fans continue to support about 1,000 tracks each year, and when one goes out of business, another one opens up.

"But that doesn't give much consolation to the guy with a Late Model in the garage and no place to run it," he says. "To him, that local track is the only one that matters."

Doty says the television view of stock car racing can misrepresent the sport as it plays out on local bullrings. "In some cities, the track is located in an area where you might not normally go without good reason," he says. "Folks see those beautiful Nextel Cup tracks on television, with new bleachers and modern restrooms, and are somewhat taken aback when they go to their local track and sit on wooden bleachers and have port-a-potty restrooms. In an urban area, they expect more."

To meet those needs, Mansfield Motor Speedway bulldozed everything but the track surface two years ago and began rebuilding in what is expected to be a $20 million project, turning it into one of the most fan-friendly short tracks in the nation and earning a spot on the Craftsman Truck schedule.

"But not all tracks have to do that," Doty says. "There are still lots of small tracks in the country where most of the fans spend the day working outside, and even port-a-potties are better than what they have available in the field. For them, the biggest requirements are that the action is hot and the beer is cold."

The pressure to survive apparently is greater on tracks in urban areas, where theaters, concerts, professional stick-and-ball teams, and the other attractions of living near a city compete for recreational dollars. And there, neighbors often are less willing to put up with the noise and dirt from a racetrack, where fans going to the track can cause traffic jams and where urban development means the land beneath an oval can be worth more than the income from the weekly races.

That's what happened two years ago in Portland and in Louisville, Kentucky. The Portland track was closed because the property owners wanted the site for future industrial development. Today, the land sits empty, waiting for the economy to turn around and attract an investor.

When the track was built, it was on a flood plain that couldn't be used for much else. Winter rains left the track under water until early spring. It was in a remote area on the north edge of the city.

But Portland kept creeping closer and closer. First there was a major interstate on the west; then a high-traffic truck route to the east; then came motels, a shopping center, a huge truck stop, and gradually the track found itself on land ripe for commercial or industrial development.

"In the property owner's case, they began to look at what it was worth for development, based on what they figured the land would do," says Craig Armstrong, who ran Portland Speedway for 15 years. "They saw the property as extremely valuable.

"If you look at it objectively, it probably made a lot of sense. But I think the owners also got caught up in a feeding frenzy for developable land. Because we didn't own the land, we were really at the mercy of the property owners. We owned the business, but all we did was lease the site."