Local Racing Promoters - Top Of Their Game

"What a lot of promoters miss is that short tracks are fragile," Curley says. "We tried to ride the coattails of NASCAR in the '80s. It was fast, with a high level of energy, and we thought we'd ride their coattails. But it's a completely different industry. There's no more synergy here than comparing apples to seven-eighths-inch bolts, and we didn't recognize that. We screwed up.

"We did get some shirttail effect. Media jumped aboard, and there was corporate interest. We got access to media that we never had, access to sponsorships that we never had had a chance for. It still helped a lot in terms of image, but it didn't help trickle down fans to us. We lost a generation of people who could come to the track, and it might take five to eight years to get in shape."

Curley says that, besides fan base, one big difference between local tracks and big-time tracks is money. The tracks at Atlanta, Daytona, and California, for instance, can afford $200,000-or $2 million-for renovations. Short tracks can't, so they make do with what they have.

All of the top promoters are impressive to talk to, but Curley seems like a walking doctorate degree in promotion. Same with York and Powell.

Several top promoters say that Cup drivers are becoming cookie-cutter images of each other. Once, there were guys like Curtis Turner, Joe Weatherly, Lee Petty, Bud Moore, Junior Johnson, guys who were characters. Even as recently as the mid-to-late '90s, you had Dale Earnhardt, Dick Trickle, Jimmy Spencer, and Ernie Irvan, guys who hailed back to the era of characters.

Now, Curley says, it's a bunch of corporate talkers with trophy wives and girlfriends. Only a few, such as Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick, are interesting.

"Other than them, it's all vanilla," he says. "All of the kids the last 20 years emulate what they see on TV, and it's hurt us. We're just recovering. We're now trying to recapture the movement we lost."

That, he says, can be the one advantage of the short tracks. The tracks can make their own heroes, and many of them are interesting. Even though it's on a small scale compared to Cup, Busch, or Craftsman Trucks, fans can get interested. They can root for and hoot against the local heroes and villains.

It's no coincidence, Curley says, that the most interesting and exciting Cup racing is at a short track: 1/2-mile Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. Cup drivers beat and bang on each other and act more the way they would at a local track.

Curley, 64, says that attention to detail is part of being a top promoter, including cleaning the 15 women's stalls and the 12 men's stalls in the restrooms at Thunder Road.

Powell says he always attends the RPM promoters workshops, and that's probably why you'll see a good promotion going from track to track. When Powell was the owner/promoter of Summerville Speedway in the mid-'90s, he held bus races, and fans got a show one night when one bus got too high on the banking and flipped over on its side. Wheeler heard of the bus races, and he wound up buying Powell's buses and running them at Charlotte.

But all promoters warn that it's not a good idea to run a promotion too often. Racing buses now and then is a novelty, but racing them every week would get boring.

York, the 2005 RPM Promoter of the Year, says it's not hard to tell how good the promoter is.

"Just driving into a facility, I can tell if he cares," York says. "A hundred gallons of paint is a cheap investment. If it's clean, it doesn't have to be fancy. He just does the best he can."

York says he checks to see if the restrooms are clean, and he checks out the concessions. Are the trash cans clean, and are they covered with sponsors' names? Is the grass mowed? Is the place well sponsored, and are the billboards well lit?

"When I go to a racetrack, I do it five hours before the race starts," York says. "If a guy doesn't have a scoreboard, he probably doesn't have good sponsors. The next easiest thing is a pace car. That's a no-brainer. It's easy to get a nice scoreboard. Any promoter worth his salt will have one. In today's world, you need a scoreboard that shows the top 10 spots."

York says that if the schedule calls for racing at 7:05, then the national anthem, the invocation, and the racing should start on time.

Some of the top promoters favor heat races over qualifying. As one top promoter notes, qualifying is boring. York says that a promoter needs to keep the program snappy.

"He needs to have heat races or qualifying races to line up and go off quickly," York says. "When one car finishes, the next car should be on the track. There should be no intermission, no dead time."