**WARNING** interesting Nascar thread {don't look}

[Nazgul]

Is NASCAR's Popularity Beginning to Fade?

Only 225,000 showed up... you know, small crowd.

I doubt it's fading though.

 

[Paul]

I was watching the race on Sunday and I was amazed to see the amount of people leaving the track on Sunday. People were stacked shoulder to shoulder for as far as you could see. I went to the Daytona 500 a few years ago and there was over 200,000 people at that event, it's amazing to see that many people packed into one place.

 

[knightrider]

The 2 TEXAS races sell out every year. And a waiting list something like the PACKER'S (NFL) for the real good seats.

 

[Toejam]

I saw an article similar to that about Atlanta, how TV ratings were down 28%. But that's a long way from fading out of the spotlight. Last I checked on Jayski, most Cup races pull ratings in the 6.5-8.0 range. NHRA will NEVER pull those kind of numers.

 

[Bullard Anderson]

It's still growing. I mean it was just a southern thing, and now they are tapping all those untapped markets. It will thrive until sponsors figure out that $40 million (my projection by 2015) is too much to pay for 1 years. Then they'll funnel down to the NHRA, and we have to be ready to soak in the dollars with a great product. Just my little small take.

 

[.]

We drove to Martinsville Indiana on Saturday morning to pick up a race car trailer. (we ended up not buying it….long story…. It had a few problems) We couldn’t look at the trailer until Sunday morning so when we rolled into Indy on Saturday night we had to find something to kill time. We decided to drive by the two race tracks (IRP and Indy) because we knew the Brickyard 400 was in town and we wanted to see how the NASCAR people do it!!! We were very surprised at how many drunk people were walking the streets and how many motor homes were parked on (what looked like) public property.

Here are a few shots I took while driving past the Indianapolis Motor speedway.

A trip to Indy wouldn't be the same if we didn’t drive past IRP. When we got there I remembered the name change. Here is a picture of the new sign in front of the track. They had the BUSCH race there on Saturday night as we were driving past.

I tried to post more pictures but the limit is 4.

 

[.]

A few more of Indy…..

I thought it looked busy!! And I was there the night before the race!!
Sorry for the blur on some of these…. The truck was moving when I took the pictures.

 

[Paul Berglund]

Great pics Brian...looks like a regular circus.
I got a chance to go to Daytona in 1999...What a trip!
Sort of a working vacation so to speak.
The whole week before the race there is a huge trade show and that is amazing in itself. I always thought that it was funny for a major race series to have their "Super Bowl" the first week of the season.