With the Truck Series adding three road courses in Lime Rock Park, Watkins Glen and the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL, but also a historic venue in Rockingham Speedway, some longtime fans continue to ask, ‘what about short tracks?’
Once upon a time, short tracks were the foundation of the Truck Series schedule, but like the industry on the whole, road courses and big tracks have become the bread and butter.
And yet, there’s more realistic interest than ever from viable short tracks in requesting a date, especially with series like SRX, ASA and CARS Tour showing off some of the better options for NASCAR in recent years.
South Boston Speedway in Virginia, for example, is owned by the same parent company that owns Pocono Raceway. Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut has lobbied for a NASCAR date for years and even recently installed SAFER Barriers.
Berlin Raceway in Michigan is invested a great deal of resources into its hospitality space and footprint and has worked towards hosting higher profile events. Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Florida hosts the Snowball Derby and 20,000 fans each December.
Simultaneously, Spire Sports and Entertainment and its Track Enterprises promotional arm has hosted Truck Series events at Knoxville Raceway, the Milwaukee Mile and now Rockingham and has looked at interesting short track venues to take a series like NASCAR Trucks to.
So, what would it take, in the eyes of NASCAR EVP Ben Kennedy, to bring the Truck Series to more of its traditional bullring facilities?
“It’s typically a handful of things that we look at,” Kennedy said in response to a question from Sportsnaut on Thursday. “New venues or potential new venues that are interested, like Lime Rock Park is a good example, we’ll have a number of conversations with them. Part of those conversations are facility improvement.
“Typically, who we’ll work with is University of Nebraska, some of our internal experts, to assess the viability of the market, the location, but importantly the quality of the facility, as well. A big part of that is what the quality of the facility looks like both outside the track as well as inside the track and in the competition areas.
“We’ll assess it. We’ll work with University of Nebraska. They’ll give us recommendations. We’ll typically share that with the track. If it makes sense at that point, we’ll continue to take a step forward.
“But SAFER barriers, certainly a lot of conversations that we’ve had around any of these new markets we go to and new venues, especially the higher speed ones. It’s the number one priority to make sure our competitors are safe.”
One thing working in the favor of short track facilities is that NASCAR itself produces the broadcasts for the second half of the season after FOX Sports turns its portion of the Cup campaign over to the other television partners.
So, where in the past, NASCAR was bound to its TV partners wanting to consolidate its broadcasts to the same facilities on the same weekend, that has loosened up in recent years. That’s the case with the Track Enterprises Truck Series races and even now with the increased number of standalone races for both undercard divisions.
Lastly, there’s the ability for a track to pay a sanctioning fee or at least have access to a title sponsor to be able to pay for a sanctioning fee.
It’s also worth noting that there is an idea out there, one supported by numerous high profile industry people, about how to use the All Star Race and preseason Clash to put resources into these types of facilities: