Pulling Out All The Stops For A Sellout

More than anything, this is about the sellout.

Or, better put, the chance that there might not be one.

Officials from Bristol Motor Speedway and Food City announced Tuesday that they will jointly sponsor a fan appreciation tour.

Between now and the second week of February, employees from BMS will make stops at 29 Food City stores in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. There will be all sorts of giveaways, including tickets
to the spring Nationwide race.

And, at each tour stop, fans will be able to buy tickets just for the March 22 Food City 500 Sprint Cup race. The speedway hasn’t had tickets like these to sell in a long, long time.

The tour provides, as Food City president Steven C. Smith put it, a chance to bring racing fans and the racing community together.

Speedway President Jeff Byrd is calling it a fact-finding mission: a chance for BMS employees to find out what race fans are talking about. Each employee must participate in at least one stop; Byrd said he will be at four of them.

From Food City’s standpoint, it gets to do something neat for its customers. It also helps out its long-time corporate partner. (Food City has been the title sponsor for the spring Sprint Cup race at BMS since the spring of 1992. That’s the second-longest title sponsorship in NASCAR, behind the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C.)

It appears to be a good situation for everyone involved.

But, the truth is, if the economy isn’t bad, this isn’t happening. Because, if the economy isn’t in such rugged shape, chances are good that BMS isn’t worried that the string of sellouts it has had for 53 races will continue.

The historic track and a popular product have a lot to do with those packed houses, but Byrd insists that a big reason BMS continues to sell out is because it doesn’t take its customers for granted.

“We always want to give race fans more than they ever expected from BMS,” he said.

When it comes to this tour, “more” means that some fans are getting a chance they’ve never had before: to buy Food City 500 tickets without having to shell out the full cost of a season ticket.

It’s still an expensive proposition (the cheapest single seat for the Food City 500 is $93), but it’s less so than having to buy a season ticket (the cheapest of which is $304).

Byrd said that, as far as he knows, BMS is ahead of any other track on the NASCAR circuit in terms of seats filled for the 2009 season. And, he added, he is confident that BMS has a better chance to sell out the Food City 500 than any other track with a spring race does.

But there’s a very real possibility that BMS won’t sell out its spring race, and that, more than anything, provides the motivation for this tour.

“Your first reaction in tough times like these is to cut back,” Byrd said. “That’s not our style at BMS.”

There’s no doubt the sellout streak means a lot to BMS officials. It is a point of pride and something to brag about, because no other track on the circuit can claim anything like it.

BMS isn’t about to give that up without a fight.

JIM CNOCKAERT is the Herald Courier sports editor. He can be reached at and at (276) 645-2572.