If you've been around Nascar long enough, you know who Bruton Smith is. For those who don't know, Smith is an 84-year old billionare who owns Speedway Motorsports, Inc (the company that owns the tracks in Atlanta, Bristol, Texas, Las Vegas, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Charlotte and Sonoma). He also has one of the largest ego's in the sport. Think Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons."
A few season's ago, he started a fight to get the season's final race moved from the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Miami, Florida (or "North Cuba" as he put it) to his Las Vegas Motor Speedway. I don't know of any promoter anywhere that would use a slur like that in an interview. But that's typical Bruton Smith and his big mouth.
He and his company have also been in the news recently for a little traffic incident at the Kentucky race two weeks ago that saw traffic backed up as far as twenty miles and saw many fans turned away due to lack of parking spaces. Smith recently issued an "apology" (if you can call it that) and directed any blame away from SMI and aimed it at the speedway itself, the state of Kentucky, even the people parking the cars. Playing the blame game is also a typical Bruton Smith tactic.
First he blamed the fans. "The people that came early had no problem," he said. "But those that waited a little bit, those were the ones that had a problem." Saying that fans waiting too late to head to the track caused the problem is ludicrous. On Nascar Raceday, the weekly pre-race show on the Speed channel (which airs two and a half hours before the actual race starts), cameras showed traffic backed up for miles. Traffic doesn't just suddenly back up for twenty miles. Those fans didn't all decide to head out the door three hours before the race. God only knows how long those fans were sitting in traffic.
Smith then went on to say that the "gameplan" discussed with Nascar, the highway patrol and those parking the cars was not executed correctly. The track has 33,000 parking spaces were cleared three hours and twenty minutes after the race. Smith went on to blame the company SMI hired to park the cars for hiring inexperienced personnel. That may or may not be true, but the fact remains: Smith's company is the one that hired the company with the inexperienced people.
But perhaps the biggest problem with this "apology," and the one that may end up costing the speedway the most in the long run is the fact that Smith has no plans to reimburse fans that never made it in to the race. Instead, he is offering a ticket exchange where those fans can trade in their ticket from Kentucky for a ticket to a race at any SMI track later in the season or for Kentucky in 2012 (like that will happen). "We've offered the exchange, but a cash refund, we will not" Smith said. "We don't want to. ... Don't confuse traffic with what occured in Dallas" (refering to the condemned Super Bowl seats).
This truly shows this man's arrogance and where his priorities are. He is more concerned about making money than the happiness of the fans. Not even giving fans the option for a refund instead of the exchange is a slap in the face to those die hards who sat in traffic for six hours, made it to the speedway and were turned away due to lack of parking. Smith's refusal to accept responsibility for his speedway's fowl-up and his resusal to refund fans hard earned money may end up costing Kentucky the cup date they fought for for years.
This sport doesn't happen without fan support. Race tickets aren't cheap and yet fans still turned out in droves to support the first cup event at the Kentucky Speedway. Those fans that still have to pay for a race they never saw deserve every cent of their money back. Bruton Smith has always been blind to how important the fans are and this phoney apology just proves that fact even further. These fans may just boycot the Kentucky race next season. Maybe when attendance isn't up to par and the track loses it's date, Smith will realize that it's the fans that drive Nascar, not the almighty dollar.
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