NASCAR says they want to promote and help local tracks but when NASCAR televises a race event on Saturday nights it takes away a portion of the audience that would have gone to see a local short track.
Local tracks depends on full grandstands to survive. In a sense, the grassroots local racetracks have to compete with the upper tier of stock car racing for the same audience when ever a Cup race is shown on Saturday nights. True, the fans could just record the race and watch it the following day, but sitting in front of a free TV is easier and cheaper than driving a half-hour to an hour away to see the racing live.
Half empty grandstands have led many track owners to close down and sell their facilities to land developers. Houses have taken over what once was East Windsor Speedway, the Grounds for Sculpture now stands where the famed Trenton Speedway once stood and Flemington Speedway, once a grand lady of a racetrack, is now home to retail stores. I shed a tear everything I drive by those places.
If NASCAR truly cared about the future of America's short tracks, as they say they do, they would schedule their races so as not to conflict with local Saturday night racing. Watching a Sprint Cup race at night is a spectacular sight but it should not occur at the expense of the roots of the sport.
Local tracks are where young drivers and mechanics learn their craft. If the tracks all dry up, then where will the Sprint Cup stars of tomorrow come from. Local tracks enable the working class guy be qwench his need for speed and strive for that little bit of glory that is victory lane, as the hometown crowd cheers his triumph.
Local short tracks are the soul of NASCAR and I wish that they would give more than just lip service to that fact.
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Well done in terms of writing style and voice. Great start to this.
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