Two classic tracks, North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham, and Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, have been favourites among the drivers. Nextel Cup star Rusty Wallace called it “sad and disturbing” that Rockingham, which staged two races as recently as 2003, will be gone from the circuit after this season.
“It's a great place to race,” Wallace said. “Can we pick up the track and move it to a bigger city?”
Darlington, which already lost its coveted and traditional Labor Day race in early September to California Speedway, will move its remaining event in '05 to the Saturday before Mother's Day in May, usually an off-week.
"It's a little unnerving," new Darlington president Chris Browning says of the rapid changes.
The alterations came after a lawsuit against NASCAR by a shareholder in Speedway Motorsports Inc. was settled. In the suit, NASCAR was accused of breaching agreements to award a second race to SMI's Texas Motor Speedway.
SMI is paying $100 million to buy North Carolina Speedway from International Speedway Corp, which is owned by the France family that founded and runs NASCAR.
Will there be more movement out of the South soon? Absolutely.
Look for Atlanta to lose one of its dates, perhaps as soon as 2006. The same is bound to happen to Martinsville, Virginia, where the shortest track on the circuit (one-half mile) was purchased by ISC, which also owns the Daytona facility, for $192 million. One of Martinsville's dates eventually will wind up at a bigger track in a more populous area.
"It's always been in the back of our mind being realigned and maybe dropping back to one race, but I'll go to my grave fighting for the two races at Martinsville," says former track owner Clay Campbell.
NASCAR added one race each at Texas and Phoenix, solidifying its base out West.
"This is another example of us increasing our visibility in an area of the country that is truly a hotbed for NASCAR fans," president Brian France says.
Next will be a move into the Northwest as soon as a facility in the Seattle, Washington, or Portland, Oregon environs is built. Site searches have been under way this year.
"We'll continue to look, we just don't have a timetable," says ISC spokesman David Talley.
Also vulnerable are the Pocono facility in Pennsylvania and the Watkins Glen road course in upstate New York. If and when NASCAR executives say a track is constructed in the New York City area, Pocono almost certainly will forfeit one of its two dates, while Watkins Glen likely will go the way of Rockingham and disappear completely from the schedule.
"That's a tough nut to crack," Talley says of New York City. "We've been looking for the right place for over three years. But we haven't given up."
The idea is to get as national as possible, with an eye on international venues (Canada, Mexico) by the end of the decade.
“I would tell you there are plenty of opportunities for our fans in the Southeast to see the sport they love the most,” France says.
But not as many as in the past, and more than likely, not nearly as many in the future.
NASCAR has advanced further from its roots by stripping one Southern track of its only race and reducing another to one event in 2005. Down the road, the stock cars will almost certainly be spending even less time in the Southeast, where the sport flourished.
