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Can the Truck Series survive a down economy?
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It is Friday, and that means we are talking Trucks here at the Detroit NASCAR examiner.
It has not been a great week of good news for my favorite NASCAR series. I saw a report on Jayski earlier in the week that Mansfield Motor sports Park was giving up its truck date, and then word came down that the Ohio track was shutting the doors.
I have attended that race the past three seasons and had a great time doing so. Sitting on the grass watching Donny Lia bump and plow his way to his first ever Truck win was one of my favorite moments of the 2008 season.
While it is sad to see nice places like Mansfield leave the Truck series schedule it is far from a death nail to the series itself. Since NASCAR wisely choose to replace that race with a race Labor Day weekend at the Iowa Speedway.
Last season I watched both the Camping World East West series combined race, and the ARCA race at Iowa. To say I was really impressed with the kind of racing that track offers would be a vast understatement.
Speaking of Labor Day, Detroiters got a piece of bad news today as hey dug themselves out from under 11 inches of snow. As proof as I do not harbor any ill will I read about this on the Detroit News website. The Detroit Grand Prix has been cancelled for 2009. While I am not a big open wheel racing fan, nor a Grand Prix fan, this news shocked me none the less.
I know what everyone is going to say an IRL event has nothing to do with NASCAR. For the most part that is correct, but there are two big factors NASCAR fans must keep in mind.
Having the IRL race Labor Day Weekend in Downtown Detroit cost Michigan International Speedway its August IRL date, since it was impossible to sell tickets to a track so far away when the IRL was coming to Detroit just two weeks later. The IRL was unwilling to give MIS a different date earlier in the year. This is significant because it puts the financial viability of MIS at risk.
NASCAR holds two Cup series races, one Nationwide Series race, and one truck series race each year at MIS. The problem is that even before this economic crisis those events were slipping in attendance, and without the IRL race revenue was already significantly diminished.
MIS faces lots of challenges, it is about four hours away from the Detroit Population hub, the weather particularly for the August date is terrible, and the racing isn’t all that great. More times then not this race is won on gas mileage gambles, while that is great for NASCAR wonks, like myself, the casual fan doesn’t want to watch guys just going around in circles. Too often races at MIS resemble this untrue stereotype of NASCAR racing.
Worse then both the Mansfield closing and Cancellation of the 2009 Detroit Grand Prix we could be seeing the first two dominoes to fall in a much larger crisis? If track owners and race promoters are going to panic and start canceling events, I would bet that any track not owned by a large corporation could be at risk.
Since MIS is owned by International Speedway Corporation it will likely survive, but there is great risk it will survive without all of its current NASCAR race dates. Since the Truck series draws the least amount of fans, it likely would be the first to go.
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