Atlanta speedway loses spring NASCAR race

“It’s bad for business,” said Pat West, a cashier at the Kangaroo Express convenience store, around the corner from the Hampton racetrack. The store routinely sold bags of ice and cases of beer for the spring race, she said. “We don’t like it. We’ll miss ‘em.”

The race and its fans not only clogged the local roadways but also added millions to state and local coffers. The fall NASCAR race was estimated to ring up a $90 million economic impact to the state in 2007, the Atlanta Sports Council said. And the races are responsible for the lion's share of $180 million in tourism revenue in Henry County in 2008, an official said.

Speedway Donuts’ owner Henry Byrd said he’ll stand to lose several thousand dollars that weekend.

The Hampton resident who used to leave town during the races ended up profiting from them when he opened the donut shop 18 months ago. It’s across from the track’s main entrance just over the Clayton County line in Henry County.

“I was just starting to get a lot of the campers that come in for the whole week,” Byrd said. “They’d come over and get breakfast in the morning for five or six other motor homes.”

Business got to be so good that Byrd opened the shop on Sundays to park cars at $20 a pop.

“My business went up a couple of thousand dollars each race weekend,” he said.

That won’t be the case anymore.

Atlanta Motor Speedway president Ed Clark said Thursday his track will lose the March race date, leaving it with just one Cup event for the first time in the track’s 50-year history.

The news comes after the track completed $40 million in repairs to damage left by a tornado in July 2005.

The Kentucky Speedway track is owned by the same Speedway Motorsports Inc. that owns AMS. Kentucky does not have a Cup date.

“This is business,” Clark said at a news conference. “Our company looked at it like we can do one event in Kentucky and make it huge and do one event in Atlanta and make it huge, and the overall gain to the company is more than doing two races in Atlanta.”

Clark and AMS have tried for years to get a warmer date for its opening race, but those efforts have not worked out. Clark said that in the end, with all the date changes, AMS could have had a chance to move its race into a better weather period, as was done when a winter event was moved to Labor Day race weekend last year.

Clark seemed to be trying his best to remain positive, but his disappointment was hard to mask. He pointed out that the bottom line in the decision was that SMI could make more money by shifting the race date.

Although Clark would not place all the blame for the lost race on the often bitter cold conditions, he acknowledged March weather was a challenge.

“It’s been a factor,” he said. “Even if it’s beautiful in the afternoon, it’s cold in the morning, cold for campers.”

Clark also pointed out that his recent March crowds, which came short of filling the track to its capacity, still were pretty large by NASCAR standards.

“Even with the crowds that we’ve been having over the past several years, we’d fill up several of the tracks on the Sprint Cup schedule,” he said. “It’s not that our crowds are that bad, it’s just that we have a lot of seats here, as a lot of the facilities do.”

He said the overall health of his industry is “not what it was, obviously.”

The long-term effect of taking another race out of the old South, NASCAR’s birthplace, remains to be seen. Fans still lament the loss of racing at tracks like North Wilkesboro Speedway and North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham. The Rockingham track, like AMS, regularly produced dramatic side-by-side racing, but suffered at the gate because of cold race dates.

The disappointment felt by Clark was reflected as concern by local businesses and officials.

Kay Pippin, president of the Henry County Chamber of Commerce, said that in 2008, tourism accounted for $180 million in county revenue.

She said that equates to more than 2,000 jobs and $13 million in state and county taxes. She said a very large part of the revenue stream comes from the races.

“Had we not had that income, it would have meant an additional $172 a year tax increase for every homeowner in Henry County,” she said.

NASCAR races have become a Mecca for fans, many who come in RVs to stay for days at a time. That migration of fans also has filled thousands of hotel rooms in Atlanta – some as far as 60 miles from the track – and sent scores of hungry diners to area restaurants.

Although the track won’t disclose attendance numbers, both the spring and fall races routinely have attracted more than 100,000 ticket holders. Attendance has been declining in recent years, along with television viewership of NASCAR races, after the sport had a meteoric rise earlier this decade.

The racetrack fits 135,000 people, including about 110,000 in the grandstands, about 17,000 in the infield, 7,000 in the 123 suites and about 1,000 in the 46 privately-owned condominiums that overlook the track, Clark has said.

In 2007, the Atlanta Sports Council estimated the fall NASCAR race would have an economic impact of $90 million on the state, including $84 million on metro Atlanta. This is the most recent data available, the sports council said Thursday.

The impact of the race waslarger than college basketball's Final Four, which the Sports Council calculated had a $51.6 million impact on the state, including $43.9 million on metro Atlanta, when it was held at the Georgia Dome in 2007. The studies are based on a model developed by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and Georgia State University economist Bruce Seaman.

Donut shop owner Byrd also is a city councilman in Hampton, the small town of 6,000 that balloons to more than 16 times its size during race weekends.

He hopes the lost race won’t affect downtown businesses after Hampton spent $750,000 to beautify the area. He also said that each race weekend brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales tax revenue for the small town.

Mary Baxter, senior marketing and e-commerce manager for Atlanta Marriott hotels, called the race cancellation “bad news.”

On Wednesday, her company opened the 403-room Atlanta Airport Marriott at the Georgia International Convention Center and last December the 147-suite Springhill Suites.

Both hotels could have benefited from the boost during the March race weekend.

“I would say its disappointing, especially for the Atlanta airport area,” she said.