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winston cigarettesAlmost as soon as it opened in 1996, Pikes Peak International Raceway seemed destined to exist on the fringes of motorsports, surviving on racing’s second-tier events.
In the eight years since, however, the racing sands have shifted under the track's 42,000-seat grandstand.
In that time, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing burst forth from its Southeastern incubator, grabbing huge TV audiences in other places and shifting from down-home sponsor Winston cigarettes to cosmopolitan sponsor Nextel cell phones.
PPIR will hold its biggest event of the year Saturday, the Gould Pumps/ITT Industries Salute to the Troops 250 presented by Dodge. That is the official name — sponsorship is a huge part of motorsports.
Country music star Martina McBride will perform a concert after
the race.
The race is part of the
NASCAR Busch Series, one notch
below the top
level. PPIR
long has wanted to join NASCAR’s countrywide movement and its top-level racing series, the Nextel Cup Series.
Whether it can make that leap remains to be seen.
PPIR executives say it can, and they are planning to make the best pitch they can to NASCAR, probably near the end of this year. They have armed themselves with research that says tens of thousands of Colorado residents are ready to jam the grandstands.
Mayors and bank presidents in this area, who once were wary of PPIR, have caught a whiff of the potential bonanza and are warming up to the idea of teaming up with PPIR to lobby NASCAR to move up to the Nextel Cup Series.
NASCAR is looking north and west, taking races from the Southeast, placing more of them in Phoenix and Dallas, and sniffing out markets such as New York and the Pacific Northwest.
To join NASCAR’s major leagues, however, PPIR not only will have to elbow its way into a group of candidate cities with much larger populations but also will have to take a lucrative Nextel race away from an established track.
PPIR also must overcome some turbulent history of its own, expand the track by half and figure out a way to persuade the rest of Colorado to stay off Interstate 25 during race day.
This will be a bold and costly gamble for a track that has never sold out a race.
Track President Rob Johnson sees only green lights.
“This is the time to go do it,” he said.
Before Johnson tries to persuade NASCAR, he said he needs community support.
In 1999, just after Johnson arrived at the track, he met with NASCAR officials about where PPIR stood.
“They said: ‘You need to convince us you can handle it, and it would be supported,’” Johnson said.
Knowing PPIR suffered from perception problems in its early years — ranging from a legendary traffic jam at its first event to episodes of shaky ownership — Johnson gathered leaders from Fountain, Pueblo and Colorado Springs to canvass their opinions on the track.
The group includes Fountain Mayor Ken Barela, El Paso County Commissioner Jim Bensberg, Bank of Broadmoor President Ed Sauer and Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments Director Rob MacDonald. The group has met monthly with 20 to 30 people typically in attendance.
The initial result of those meetings was Speedweek, which started last year as a weeklong, coordinated promotion that had a PPIR event at one end and the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb at the other.
The conversation changed, however, once NASCAR announced its realignment plans last summer.
“I start to see people walk into the advisory committee carrying USA Today stories about the economic impact of Nextel Cup on communities and how motorsports is growing and becoming huge, and questions come out,” Johnson said.
To understand the impact of a Nextel Cup race, think about a Super Bowl that moves across the country 36 weeks a year.
Although a few speedways can accommodate upward of 150,000 fans, PPIR projects adding 25,000 seats for a Nextel Cup race, bringing total capacity to about 65,000.
Because demand for tickets at most tracks across the country is huge, even at premium prices, PPIR would stand to make millions in revenue from ticket sales, merchandise sales, concessions and TV revenue.
Local economist David Bamberger said a race also would mean an $83.6 million increase in local sales, almost 1,600 new jobs and an additional $5.6 million for the area in sales and property tax receipts.
Bamberger’s economic models involve the effect on secondary parts of the local economy. For example, many of the jobs would be short-term — such as a soda vendor or ticket-taker at the track.
The track and local leaders would try to use a Nextel race to entice tourists to stay in the area longer to see other sites in Colorado.
Johnson projects 15,000 people would see the race from motor homes in the infield, and Bamberger estimated each outof-state guest would spend $165 a day. That in turn would spread the money to other parts of the economy.
Phoenix, which just got a second Nextel event for 2005, estimates the 2003 race had a $200 million economic impact.
Bristol, Tenn., has a population of about 24,000, but the small town in the eastern part of the state is in the heart of NASCAR country and brings in big money. The city estimates two Nextel cup races there this year will have a $294 million impact.
Part of Johnson’s task was to explain the challenge and the potential benefit to local leaders.
PPIR’s location, 20 miles south of Colorado Springs, always has been considered a huge negative in terms of attracting fans from Denver. So PPIR hired Ellison Research Associates, a Phoenix-based survey group, to study the Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo markets.
Based on 600 phone interviews that each lasted about 12 minutes, the group found that 52,000 to 130,000 residents in the three cities would be “extremely likely” to purchase a season pass at PPIR with a Nextel Cup race, and 185,000 to 263,000 would be “very likely” to purchase a ticket just to the Nextel Cup race.
The research also showed that people who identified themselves as NASCAR fans would drive as far as 2.5 times the distance they thought PPIR was from their homes to attend a Nextel Cup race.
“In a sports-crazy market, my gut told me they’d drive to PPIR to go to a Cup race,” Johnson said. “When we did the research . . . that helped me. That reinforced that people will go out for the big prize like they do in any other sport.”
Through the advisory group, PPIR is trying to establish a coalition of support to put up a united front when the pitch to NASCAR is made. Although that may seem obvious and minor, it’s a significant change from PPIR’s history.
The track was built quickly, with little community involvement, and within two years serious questions arose about how long the track could afford to operate.
“There was a lot of rumors about the success or lack thereof, whether it was ever going to make it,” Fountain City Manager Greg Nyhoff said. “There’s a lot more confidence in this track today than there was five years ago, without a shadow of a doubt.
“For us, as a community, it’s a no-brainer. Our job is to be as much support as we possibly can. As a community, we want this track to be looked at positively.”
Johnson said he isn’t sure what role the group will play in the pitch to NASCAR, but it won’t be financial.
The track was financed with private money, and any track expansion will fall under the same category.
The state Legislature issued a proclamation supporting the track’s efforts to bring a Nextel race to Colorado.
“If you put together a working committee that has representatives of all the communities and build a good case, you have a chance,” Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau President Terry Sullivan said. “We’ll continue to pursue it until we’re told to stop. Just like World Arena — it was seven years of work before we broke ground, but it’s a marvelous asset to the community now.”
NASCAR began racing on the sands of Daytona Beach, Fla., more than 50 years ago and once proudly boasted of the bootleggers who became its best drivers.
The explosive growth of NASCAR during the past decade, however, has transformed what once was a sport of regional interest into a nationwide phenomenon.
Stereotypes aside, NASCAR says 42 percent of its fans earn $50,000 or more a year. About 40 percent of fans are women. The TV ratings beat every professional sport except the NFL.
NBC, TNT and Fox are in the fourth year of their sixyear, $2.4 billion TV deal with NASCAR. NBC said its broadcast of the July 13 race at Chicagoland Speedway had the best overnight rating of any weekend sports broadcast.
Fox showed the Pepsi 400 on July 3 at Daytona in prime time, and NBC has prime-time broadcasts scheduled for September and October.
NASCAR ended a 32-year relationship last season with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which sponsored the Winston Cup series.
In its place, NASCAR signed a 10-year, $700 million agreement for wireless communications giant Nextel — which outbid McDonald’s and Coca-Cola — to be the title sponsor.
About the same time, NASCAR President Mike Helton announced “Realignment 2004 and Beyond,” beginning the process of moving some events on the 36-race schedule to venues outside the Southeast.
The key phrases Helton used were “growing the sport,” bringing races to the “widestpossible audience” and “geographical balancing” of the schedule.
Races for 2005 were moved from Carolina tracks to Texas and Phoenix, giving those tracks two races apiece.
International Speedway Corporation is one arm of the France family, which also runs NASCAR. ISC owns 13 tracks on which 19 of 36 Nextel races will be run this season.
ISC entered a consulting and marketing agreement with PPIR in August 2002, something it does not have with any other track. ISC has the option to buy PPIR through 2007 if the owner, Lehman Brothers Holdings, chooses to sell.
This arrangement is an opportunity and a challenge for PPIR.
Close association with ISC is a quick way to move into the Nextel Series, and NASCAR and the France family would prefer to keep the money in their hands, so if they think this track can generate more than tracks elsewhere, they might choose to put a Nextel race here.
“We thought that was a good market to see if we could assist them,” ISC Marketing Director Paul Phipps said. “Part of it was being good industry partners. It’s a challenge. (Johnson) has got a big challenge there.”
When NASCAR announced its plans for realignment in 2004 and beyond, Johnson for the first time had legitimate hope that the top stock-car racing series would look at PPIR, whether or not the track is owned by ISC.
“For them to come out and say: ‘We’ll look at realignment,’ that changed the game for how you pitched for these,” Johnson said.
“You need to show them this is an untapped market. It’s big enough and untapped that it’s worth it for them to come here. You’ll expose people to motorsports, and that’ll pay dividends down the road.”
NASCAR’s official stance on PPIR always has been that the track isn’t a Nextel Cup venue in terms of seating capacity and infrastructure around the track.
NASCAR sources, however, said PPIR’s seating capacity of 42,000 has little to do with it.
The track could expand seating capacity to 65,000 in six months, Discount cheap cigarettes Cigarettes-online-store.net sales cheap and high quality duty free discount cigarettes online Johnson said, bringing it in line with several Nextel Cup tracks.
The bigger issue is traffic because I-25 is the only major access road to the track.
PPIR was unprepared for its first event and suffered a traffic nightmare, the memory of which lingers.
Although PPIR has taken steps to alleviate traffic problems, putting 25,000 more people in the grandstand would create a new set of issues.
So PPIR hired transportation design firm URS Corp. and began working with the Colorado Department of Transportation on a plan that would empty the track in three hours, a standard time frame for Nextel Cup races.
The plan includes transporting 10,750 fans to the track by bus from several area parking lots such as the one at World Arena.
Post-race traffic plans that are being formulated include temporarily modifying lanes on I-25, perhaps using a third lane for traffic going north to Colorado Springs and Denver or a “through lane” to alleviate the congestion caused by cars merging at on-ramps.
Even without a Nextel Cup race, Johnson said he has “100 percent” commitment from ownership and that the track isn’t going away anytime soon.
Although Johnson declined to say directly whether PPIR is profitable, he said it can survive with a Busch race and its other big event, the Indy Racing League’s Honda 225, scheduled for Aug. 22.
“It’s never been predicated on getting a silver bullet,” he said. “We’re ahead of plan. We’re doing better than we planned on doing right now today.
“This is no easy process, and I don’t have a formula, but I told them I was going to spend some of your money, and I’ve gotten complete support.”