One of Bristol Motor Speedway’s corporate clients returned 175 tickets to Sunday’s Food City 500 with less than five days before the race was set to start.
BMS President and General Manager Jeff Byrd mentioned the availability of the returned tickets – which have a face value of $93 to $133 depending on their location – at 4:30 p.m. Monday during a previously scheduled radio appearance.
Within 30 minutes of Byrd’s appearance, speedway staff sold 50 of the returned tickets and had 20 callers on hold waiting to buy whatever was left.
"The phones were pretty busy pretty quick," said BMS spokesman Kevin Triplett, who expects Sunday’s race to be the speedway’s 52nd consecutive sold-out cup race. "The response was miraculous."
He said only "a small handful" of tickets for single seats scattered throughout the 160,000-seat speedway remain available for the race.
But that doesn’t mean NASCAR fans don’t stand a chance at getting tickets to Sunday’s race. They can always turn to an on-line second-hand ticket retailer like StubHub.com or Ticketmaster’s TicketExchange.
Both Web sites have a few years of experience working with BMS and list plenty of tickets available for race fans in need. They also have several hundred tickets to choose from for any race fan willing to pay their small fees.
"We want the speedway to serve racing fans as broadly as possible," Ticketmaster spokesman Joe Freeman said as he described the services available through his company’s Web site: www.ticketexchange.com.
People looking to get rid of extra tickets turn in a credit card number and the individual ticket’s bar code number when they register on Freeman’s site.
Freeman said TicketExchange has no price limitations for BMS tickets because Tennessee has no state resale price cap laws like North Carolina. Ticket sellers are charged a 10 percent fee to sell their tickets on the site, meaning a person with a $100 ticket would pocket $90 once their transaction is complete.
Freeman said the service also charges ticket purchasers a service fee, though he was not authorized to release the amount because it was proprietary information.
TicketExchange listed 1,140 tickets at about 7 p.m. Tuesday that ranged in price from $106.95 per ticket the Allisons section to $235.75 in the Earnhardt Terrace.
StubHub spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer said her company’s Web site – www.StubHub.com – has an equal amount of tickets available to Sunday’s race with an average price of $131.
"It’s a managed marketplace," Ferrer said Tuesday, adding her Web site doesn’t take possession of any tickets. "We facilitate the transaction on both ends."
StubHub has listed BMS tickets since 2003, when the average seat went for $169. Ferrer said the average price peaked at $194 per ticket in 2005 and slowly declined since then.
The site also lets ticket sellers set their own prices. Buyers pay a 10 percent fee per transaction while sellers pay a 15 percent fee for the service.
gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518
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