NASCAR: Despite attendance woes, NASCAR continues to roll on

Despite dwindling crowds, as evidenced this past weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway, NASCAR remains the most popular motorsport in America.

The NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway was the topic of discussion for all the wrong reasons on social media last weekend.

Though there was plenty of discussion about the on-track activity during the eighth race of the season, fans could not help notice another frequently brought-up topic: attendance, or lack thereof.

What was once one of the hardest tickets to get in sports, fans would have had no problems getting a hold. According to the Bristol Herald Courier, the facility, which has a seating capacity of over 150,000, drew a mire 38,000 spectators Sunday for the Food City 500.

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The crowd was so small that speedway management did not even bother opening certain sections of the track, with the Kulwicki Terrace and most of the Waltrip Terrace roped off in an effort to “enhance the fan experience” by bringing the fans who did attend Sunday’s race together in the straightaway sections on both sides of the track.

Sunday’s small crowd is even more shocking when you see popular image that has been making its way around social media, one that compares the 2019 crowd to a sold-out crowd in 2009. Within 10 years, Bristol’s spring race has seen a nearly 75% decrease in attendance, and though the track’s night race in August generally draws a larger crowd, there will still be plenty of tickets available for fans to purchase come race day, something that was not the case before.

Though Bristol’s attendance woes are certainly the most noticeable, the track is not the lone facility that draws crowds smaller than what they once were. Sans for the season-opening Daytona 500, no Cup Series race has sold out so far this season, with a lack of fans in the stands more noticeable at some tracks than at others.

But just because not as many fans attend races as they used to doesn’t mean NASCAR will cease to exist in a few years. Rather, NASCAR will likely remain a major sanctioning body for years to come, albeit with a few inevitable changes to meet the current market demands.

Just as NASCAR’s television ratings have declined over the past few years (although the sport has seen a small increase over the 2018 season so far this season), NASCAR fans cannot expect their favorite racing series to draw crowds in excess of 100,000 spectators every single race weekend anymore. It isn’t 2004 anymore.

Race fans need to understand that the world has changed since NASCAR’s peak in popularity 15 years ago. The Great Recession may have ended, but it still lingers in the backs of many minds, meaning that people aren’t willing to just pack their bags and drop anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars to travel cross-country to attend a stock car race anymore.

With the combination of increasing costs to own and maintain a car as well as increased public transportation in major cities, millennials don’t share the same level of interest in automobiles as past generations did. It’s not hard to understand why auto racing might not be interesting to someone who did not grow up around “car culture”.

Fans can blame the decline of NASCAR on Brian France, the playoffs, the Car of Tomorrow, the losses of Rockingham Speedway and North Wilkesboro Speedway, Jimmie Johnson, Kyle Busch or anyone or anything else they would like to, and those examples may have contributed to the decline in some form.

But it would be naive to believe that the NASCAR “fad” was going to last forever. People simply find new interests, and no matter what NASCAR management tries to do, they won’t be able to bring everyone back.

But that’s okay! Whether race fans want to admit it or not, auto racing has always been and likely will always be a niche sport, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of other big-league racing series such as IndyCar attract smaller crowds and survive just fine.

NASCAR might not be as popular as it once was, and it may even shrink more over the coming years, but as long as there is even just a small group of dedicated fans who passionately love the sport, it will live on for many years to come.

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The next race on the 2019 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series schedule is the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway. The live broadcast of this race is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, April 13 on Fox.

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