Night race would help beat the heat at Kansas

Jun 06, 2011 |

They threw ice bags on top of Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Carl Edwards sarcastically asked for a cup of hot chocolate. Denny Hamlin asked how hot a sauna is, and, told it could be 180 degrees or so, said sitting in one for four hours could show you what it&#x92;s like to drive a race car on an unrelenting Midwestern summer afternoon.</p><p>And that&#x92;s just the drivers, the ones who are paid millions to be here, contractually required to show up and say nice things about Kansas Speedway and the inaugural STP 400 on Sunday.</p><p>The fans? They had it even worse, sweating through an afternoon deciding when to scramble toward the grandstand&#x92;s shade &#x97; which meant missing the race they&#x92;d paid to see. Temperatures went into the mid-90s, and the Speedway&#x92;s location and the logistics of auto racing mean the track always feels five to 10 degrees warmer than the thermometer.</p><p>There are many factors, we all understand that, but it&#x92;s hard not to notice that the estimated 80,000 fans on Sunday were around 20 percent less than the Speedway has drawn in the past.</p><p>All of which is a setup to state the obvious: Kansas Speedway has a new second race now, and if the people here want it to work they need to use their new lights and run the thing at night.</p><p>&#x93;I&#x92;m getting all these Twitter messages,&#x94; Speedway president Pat Warren says, &#x93;people saying, &#x91;It&#x92;s brutally hot, let&#x92;s run a night race.&#x92; &#x94;</p><p>The Speedway is in its adolescence now, past its days as a NASCAR newbie, fully entrenched in being labeled &#x93;a model of how things should be done&#x94; by International Speedway Corp. CEO Lesa France Kennedy.</p><p>There is so much to like here, a business monster drawing well over at least a nine-state Heartland region stuffed with racing fans. Praise from Kennedy and others usually mentions the shopping and bars and other destination spots around the Speedway, a situation that will only get better when the Hollywood Casino opens early next year.</p><p>But other places have lost momentum after landing a second Sprint Cup race, including an iconic track in Bristol and another with a casino in Dover.</p><p>Kansas Speedway wouldn&#x92;t be the first with a seemingly fail-proof model to lose customers after adding a second race, and one way to encourage fans to stay at home &#x97; like thousands did Sunday &#x97; is to hold the race on days the participants compare to saunas.</p><p>Kansas City weather is notoriously unpredictable, of course. The high temperature was 63 degrees five days before the teams arrived here last week. But it was 91 on June 5 last year.</p><p>You can&#x92;t ask people to pay hundreds of dollars and fight traffic to come to an event where they&#x92;ll want to miss a big chunk of it to keep from passing out.</p><p>There&#x92;s another benefit to having a night race that has nothing to do with weather, and that&#x92;s using the lights to differentiate the Speedway&#x92;s two weekends. Some NASCAR officials wonder whether simply adding another date to the same track creates a duplicate experience that fans don&#x92;t need.</p><p>Kansas Speedway can avoid that by having a night race in the summer and a day race in the fall that is part of NASCAR&#x92;s playoffs.</p><p>Warren argues that it would actually be better to put the night race in October, because people are more willing to go to a hot event in the summer and a cold event in the fall. He qualifies that by saying &#x93;I have no research to back that up,&#x94; but even so, agrees that it is important for the Speedway to turn the lights on for future races.</p><p>Asked whether he had a good feeling about landing a night race, Warren said, &#x93;I really don&#x92;t know. I have no idea. I wish I did.&#x94;</p><p>The reality is that it&#x92;s not up to Warren or anyone at the Speedway. Scheduling is done mostly by NASCAR and its television partners, and they&#x92;ll consider some factors that have nothing to do with the fan experience at Kansas Speedway, such as whether they would want two consecutive weeks of night racing after the Coca-Cola 600&#x92;s traditional late start every Memorial Day weekend.</p><p>But it&#x92;s in everyone&#x92;s best interests to make fans at the Speedway happy, because empty grandstands make for bad television. Even Hamlin, who asked how hot saunas are, sees that.</p><p>&#x93;As long as they continue to fill the seats here,&#x94; he says, &#x93;it&#x92;s irrelevant.&#x94;</p><p>Kansas Speedway has created quite a good reputation around NASCAR. There have been no failures here, no steps backward. Only successes, only growth.</p><p>Thousands of empty seats on Sunday don&#x92;t need to be taken as a reason for panic, but they shouldn&#x92;t be ignored, either.</p><p>Letting fans watch Kansas Speedway&#x92;s summer race out of the hot sun would be an easy way to do good by a track that&#x92;s been very good for NASCAR.

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