Despite Economy Food City 500 Playing to 54th Consecutive Sellout at BMS

BRISTOL, Tenn. – The streak is alive, but just barely.

Today’s Food City 500 will play to the 54th consecutive sellout at Bristol Motor Speedway, track president and general manager Jeff Byrd announced Saturday, less than 24 hours before the start of the race.

“It took longer than we thought, but we’re very excited to be racing again in front of a packed house,” Byrd said during a telephone conversation. “It’s a tribute to the people who work at the speedway, our fans and the people of the region. They made it happen.”

The streak at the 160,000-seat track dates to Aug. 28, 1982 and is the longest in NASCAR. The Food City 500 is the first Sprint Cup race of the 2009 season to sell out.

Packed stands and long waiting lists for tickets were once a guarantee and part of the lure of BMS, a must-see venue billed as the world’s fastest half-mile. But a lingering economic recession has hammered at race fans’ discretionary income. And Byrd reported nearly two weeks ago that corporate tickets sales for the spring race were down 50 percent from a year ago.

That meant for the first time since Byrd came to BMS in 1996, the speedway had Cup tickets available in the weeks leading up to the spring race.

“This is all new to us,” Byrd said in a recent interview. “The rest of the 23 [NASCAR] speedways live this life every time they have a race.”

Byrd said Saturday that he and the BMS staff learned a lot about selling tickets in the two months since speedway officials announced that they had them available. In fact, he said he probably could have announced a sellout earlier in the week, but it took his ticket staff longer than expected to process last-minute telephone orders.

“Our people responded magnificently to the challenge of selling Cup tickets for the first time in their life in the most difficult economy probably any of us have ever lived in,” Byrd said.