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Nascar24rainbow
Guest
I though this was a very interesting article. I think NASCAR would be stupid not to move a race or two up into Canada over the next 5 to 10 years, especially in Montreal and the new speedway in Fort Erie that is partially being designed by Jeff Gordon. NASCAR is all about getting into new large markets and Toronto and Montreal are two very large markets. Plus it would be nice to have another road course on the schedule as well as a more unique 1 mile oval. I would have no issue at all if they took away a race from a cookie cutter track and/or Pocono to make this happen in the future.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/news?slug=nascar_com-inside.line.canada.deserves.cup.race-20100825
Inside Line: Canada continues to bolster its case for Cup event
By David Caraviello
Oh, Canada. Every year you do this, cramming the grandstands at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and turning your annual Nationwide Series race into a chanting, flag-waving extravaganza of motorsports goodwill. NASCAR’s venture into Montreal has been so well-received by spectators and competitors alike that it’s easy to believe a Cup Series event added north of the border would go down about as easily as an ice-cold Labatt’s Blue.
By now, we all know the reasons why it shouldn’t happen—the Sprint Cup schedule is maxed out as it is, and there are already tracks lined up to try to squeeze more dates out of a slate that’s packed full between Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving. But this is about the reasons why it should happen, and Exhibit A is a Montreal road race that in four short years has grown to become arguably the Nationwide tour’s second-biggest event behind the season opener in Daytona.
No question, it was all by design—a cosmopolitan, big-city backdrop, a storied venue, a scheduling slot on a Sprint Cup off week, a road race that gives more Canadian drivers opportunities behind the wheel. Pieces were very carefully set in place. But the fans still had to turn out, and they have. This isn’t Mexico City, where over the course of four years attendance plummeted by almost half. With the exception of the rain-plagued event in between, the crowds at Montreal have remained a steady 68,000-plus from year one to year three. Kentucky Speedway landed a Cup event for drawing as much.
But this is all bigger than one race. This is about NASCAR’s Canadian Tire feeder series drawing strong crowds to places like Saskatoon, Sask., or Vernon, B.C. This is about Kyle Busch being invited to sign autographs at a race track in London, Ont., and attracting a horde of fans decked out in M&Ms and NOS jackets. This is about some of the biggest attractions at January’s Canadian Motorsports Expo outside Toronto being Matt Kenseth and the show cars of Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This is about a branch of the NASCAR fan base that for years has watched races on television, and is just yearning to be let in on the big show.
“It’s kind of funny,” said Greg MacPherson, co-owner of the Canadian Motorsports Expo and publisher of a monthly Canadian racing magazine called Inside Track Motorsport News. “I think in the cities where the big agencies are, it’s still very much hockey-centric. But you leave the cities, and you see the guys with their pickup trucks with the 88s and 24s on them. [NASCAR drivers] are huge stars, and they draw. People up here know who they are. It’s just funny that the marketing people are a little slower to catch on to that. It’s like this rural secret that Toronto hasn’t caught onto yet.”
To a certain extent Montreal has helped pull back that curtain, with the volume of Canadians in the field—five are on the entry list for Sunday’s event—providing the event with a geographic foothold. MacPherson wonders if that could be replicated in a Cup race, given how few drivers at NASCAR’s highest level turn their cars over to specialists or locals for a road-course event. But Carl Edwards, the winner of last season’s race, still has the singing from Victory Lane ringing in his ears, and believes a Cup race in Canada would be a huge hit.
“The fan presence is there, the race track and the city are just fun to go to,” Edwards said. “It’s a fun place to stay. It’s a fun track to race on. The problem is the politics and the money and the contracts and all those things. To me, the Canadian fans, it’s like going to Kentucky or going to Iowa, these places where they love their stock-car racing and they want to see these races and it’s a change of pace for them. They’re amped up. There’s so much energy there … I was standing in Victory Lane, and we’d just won this race last year, and the crowd was singing in unison. They were singing songs. I’d never seen anything like that. If you had guys up there like Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and people like Richard Petty walking around, I would assume the fans would be very, very excited about that.”
But would NASCAR be excited about adding another road course to its premier-division schedule? Likely not, given how many more people can (and probably would prefer to) attend a race at a first-class oval facility of the type Canada doesn’t have. Even so, the number of Ontario and Quebec license plates to be found in any race track parking lot is a testament to the passion of Canadian fans. Michigan International Speedway has leaned heavily on visitors from Canada to offset the loss of those from recession-plagued Detroit, reason enough to have “O Canada” sung before every event in Brooklyn.
There seems to be an palpable sense among Canadian race fans that they’ve proven themselves, both at U.S. tracks and in the successful Montreal Nationwide event, and are prepared to graduate to a Cup race of their own. McPherson, whose magazine is based in Toronto and is already trying to line up NASCAR drivers for next year’s Canadian Motorsports Expo, can feel it. Now it’s just a matter of the sponsors jumping on board.
“I think so,” he said. “On one hand you have a lot of tracks along the top of the United States that people can go to. Michigan is very close, [Watkins] Glen, New Hampshire, Pocono. But I think so. They’re laying the groundwork for something like that. Canadian Tire, the sponsor up here, they’re involved in motorsports in a big way, from karting right up to supporting Ron Fellows in the Nationwide race. I think you’re starting to get a bit of awareness from the companies to where it’s maybe catching up to where the people are, but I know that would be well-supported. The only issue is the facility.”
Which may not be an issue for very much longer. Late September could see the groundbreaking for Canadian Motor Speedway, a 1-mile oval in Fort Erie, Ont., being designed by architect Paxton Waters with input from Gordon, who is serving as an advisor on the project—much like Rusty Wallace did on another Waters creation, Iowa Speedway. The project has the backing of the nearby communities of Fort Erie and Niagara Falls, and in terms of regulatory approvals is “99 percent there,” Waters said from his office outside Indianapolis. “We’re all feeling very good about that.”
The facility, which would seat 65,000 and be expandable to 100,000, could open in spring or late summer of 2012, with some racing planned for that year. Although designs are not yet final, in theory the speedway sounds like a motorsports marvel. Waters envisions a garage area that can be viewed up close without pit passes, a 2.7-mile road course that weaves in and out of the oval so fans can watch from permanent grandstands, convertible hospitality areas, and a hockey rink in the infield. Maybe even a hotel. And a ski jump. Seriously.
“We’ve got this facility. Let’s see what we can do with it,” Waters said. “Sure we’re going to do a great race track. Jeff would kill me if I didn’t. That much is a given. It’s, ‘How do you make this a destination place all the time?’ One of our advantages is, we’re close to Niagara Falls, so that attitude is already there. People are already on vacation.”
The proposed site is across the border from Buffalo and about 90 minutes from Toronto. Although there’s some local opposition to the project—including one group whose Web site refers to NASCAR spectators as “fan-billies” and spews misinformation like claims that race track noise can be heard 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away—Waters said the reception in Canada has been a welcome change from some municipalities, even in the U.S., that put up fierce opposition to the idea of a race track. Any NASCAR-watcher who saw proposed tracks near Denver, Seattle, and New York fold up can relate.
“I’ve been at plenty of hearings for race track design projects, one at California where everybody was yelling and screaming against the project, and even spray-painted some cars, and it just went on and on and on,” said Waters, who estimated that he’s been to Canada 10 times to work on the project. “In Canada people made T-shirts … for the track, they want it so bad. It was like, ‘Boy, this is refreshing.’ They can’t wait for it. And I think they deserve it—a major, serious, oval.”
The project’s low-profile nature has helped. “They’ve been quiet,” MacPherson said. “There’s a lot of work behind the scenes to get the approvals for land usage and the project itself. They’ve kind of been keeping their heads down, doing the work, getting approvals. It’s my understanding that they’re very close on things. Then they’re going to come make some noise. There’s a history of people coming here and saying, ‘We’re going to build a superspeedway,’ and it never happens. So there is a bit of skepticism that way, people saying, ‘Oh, it’s just another pipe dream.’ But I don’t think so.”
If the track materializes, will NASCAR races follow? Although Waters said the Canadian Motor Speedway group keeps NASCAR appraised of developments, he knows you don’t ask for an event in advance. Of course, there were no guarantees at Iowa Speedway, either, and next year that track will have a Camping World Truck event and two Nationwide races to go along with an IndyCar stop. The Fort Erie project promises to be a larger facility with larger population centers nearby.
“Iowa isn’t the biggest market in the world,” Waters said, “and if they can get Nationwide and Truck and IndyCar, you would think that a market like Ontario—Toronto with five and a half million people an hour and a half away, and Buffalo and all that—could. Is it guaranteed? No. But if you look at recent history, it seems pretty good.”
That also has to seem pretty good to Canadian NASCAR fans who have yearned for a return to the sport’s biggest stage. It’s been a long time since 1958, the last time NASCAR’s premier series ventured north of the border, when a skinny kid named Richard Petty made his first big-league start at Toronto’s Canadian Exposition Stadium, in an event his father Lee Petty won. Is it time to go back? If the crowds continue to converge on Montreal, and if that long-awaited big oval rises from the ground near Fort Erie, the answer should be as obvious as Sidney Crosby firing a puck toward an empty net.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/news?slug=nascar_com-inside.line.canada.deserves.cup.race-20100825
Inside Line: Canada continues to bolster its case for Cup event
By David Caraviello
Oh, Canada. Every year you do this, cramming the grandstands at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and turning your annual Nationwide Series race into a chanting, flag-waving extravaganza of motorsports goodwill. NASCAR’s venture into Montreal has been so well-received by spectators and competitors alike that it’s easy to believe a Cup Series event added north of the border would go down about as easily as an ice-cold Labatt’s Blue.
By now, we all know the reasons why it shouldn’t happen—the Sprint Cup schedule is maxed out as it is, and there are already tracks lined up to try to squeeze more dates out of a slate that’s packed full between Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving. But this is about the reasons why it should happen, and Exhibit A is a Montreal road race that in four short years has grown to become arguably the Nationwide tour’s second-biggest event behind the season opener in Daytona.
No question, it was all by design—a cosmopolitan, big-city backdrop, a storied venue, a scheduling slot on a Sprint Cup off week, a road race that gives more Canadian drivers opportunities behind the wheel. Pieces were very carefully set in place. But the fans still had to turn out, and they have. This isn’t Mexico City, where over the course of four years attendance plummeted by almost half. With the exception of the rain-plagued event in between, the crowds at Montreal have remained a steady 68,000-plus from year one to year three. Kentucky Speedway landed a Cup event for drawing as much.
But this is all bigger than one race. This is about NASCAR’s Canadian Tire feeder series drawing strong crowds to places like Saskatoon, Sask., or Vernon, B.C. This is about Kyle Busch being invited to sign autographs at a race track in London, Ont., and attracting a horde of fans decked out in M&Ms and NOS jackets. This is about some of the biggest attractions at January’s Canadian Motorsports Expo outside Toronto being Matt Kenseth and the show cars of Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This is about a branch of the NASCAR fan base that for years has watched races on television, and is just yearning to be let in on the big show.
“It’s kind of funny,” said Greg MacPherson, co-owner of the Canadian Motorsports Expo and publisher of a monthly Canadian racing magazine called Inside Track Motorsport News. “I think in the cities where the big agencies are, it’s still very much hockey-centric. But you leave the cities, and you see the guys with their pickup trucks with the 88s and 24s on them. [NASCAR drivers] are huge stars, and they draw. People up here know who they are. It’s just funny that the marketing people are a little slower to catch on to that. It’s like this rural secret that Toronto hasn’t caught onto yet.”
To a certain extent Montreal has helped pull back that curtain, with the volume of Canadians in the field—five are on the entry list for Sunday’s event—providing the event with a geographic foothold. MacPherson wonders if that could be replicated in a Cup race, given how few drivers at NASCAR’s highest level turn their cars over to specialists or locals for a road-course event. But Carl Edwards, the winner of last season’s race, still has the singing from Victory Lane ringing in his ears, and believes a Cup race in Canada would be a huge hit.
“The fan presence is there, the race track and the city are just fun to go to,” Edwards said. “It’s a fun place to stay. It’s a fun track to race on. The problem is the politics and the money and the contracts and all those things. To me, the Canadian fans, it’s like going to Kentucky or going to Iowa, these places where they love their stock-car racing and they want to see these races and it’s a change of pace for them. They’re amped up. There’s so much energy there … I was standing in Victory Lane, and we’d just won this race last year, and the crowd was singing in unison. They were singing songs. I’d never seen anything like that. If you had guys up there like Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and people like Richard Petty walking around, I would assume the fans would be very, very excited about that.”
But would NASCAR be excited about adding another road course to its premier-division schedule? Likely not, given how many more people can (and probably would prefer to) attend a race at a first-class oval facility of the type Canada doesn’t have. Even so, the number of Ontario and Quebec license plates to be found in any race track parking lot is a testament to the passion of Canadian fans. Michigan International Speedway has leaned heavily on visitors from Canada to offset the loss of those from recession-plagued Detroit, reason enough to have “O Canada” sung before every event in Brooklyn.
There seems to be an palpable sense among Canadian race fans that they’ve proven themselves, both at U.S. tracks and in the successful Montreal Nationwide event, and are prepared to graduate to a Cup race of their own. McPherson, whose magazine is based in Toronto and is already trying to line up NASCAR drivers for next year’s Canadian Motorsports Expo, can feel it. Now it’s just a matter of the sponsors jumping on board.
“I think so,” he said. “On one hand you have a lot of tracks along the top of the United States that people can go to. Michigan is very close, [Watkins] Glen, New Hampshire, Pocono. But I think so. They’re laying the groundwork for something like that. Canadian Tire, the sponsor up here, they’re involved in motorsports in a big way, from karting right up to supporting Ron Fellows in the Nationwide race. I think you’re starting to get a bit of awareness from the companies to where it’s maybe catching up to where the people are, but I know that would be well-supported. The only issue is the facility.”
Which may not be an issue for very much longer. Late September could see the groundbreaking for Canadian Motor Speedway, a 1-mile oval in Fort Erie, Ont., being designed by architect Paxton Waters with input from Gordon, who is serving as an advisor on the project—much like Rusty Wallace did on another Waters creation, Iowa Speedway. The project has the backing of the nearby communities of Fort Erie and Niagara Falls, and in terms of regulatory approvals is “99 percent there,” Waters said from his office outside Indianapolis. “We’re all feeling very good about that.”
The facility, which would seat 65,000 and be expandable to 100,000, could open in spring or late summer of 2012, with some racing planned for that year. Although designs are not yet final, in theory the speedway sounds like a motorsports marvel. Waters envisions a garage area that can be viewed up close without pit passes, a 2.7-mile road course that weaves in and out of the oval so fans can watch from permanent grandstands, convertible hospitality areas, and a hockey rink in the infield. Maybe even a hotel. And a ski jump. Seriously.
“We’ve got this facility. Let’s see what we can do with it,” Waters said. “Sure we’re going to do a great race track. Jeff would kill me if I didn’t. That much is a given. It’s, ‘How do you make this a destination place all the time?’ One of our advantages is, we’re close to Niagara Falls, so that attitude is already there. People are already on vacation.”
The proposed site is across the border from Buffalo and about 90 minutes from Toronto. Although there’s some local opposition to the project—including one group whose Web site refers to NASCAR spectators as “fan-billies” and spews misinformation like claims that race track noise can be heard 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away—Waters said the reception in Canada has been a welcome change from some municipalities, even in the U.S., that put up fierce opposition to the idea of a race track. Any NASCAR-watcher who saw proposed tracks near Denver, Seattle, and New York fold up can relate.
“I’ve been at plenty of hearings for race track design projects, one at California where everybody was yelling and screaming against the project, and even spray-painted some cars, and it just went on and on and on,” said Waters, who estimated that he’s been to Canada 10 times to work on the project. “In Canada people made T-shirts … for the track, they want it so bad. It was like, ‘Boy, this is refreshing.’ They can’t wait for it. And I think they deserve it—a major, serious, oval.”
The project’s low-profile nature has helped. “They’ve been quiet,” MacPherson said. “There’s a lot of work behind the scenes to get the approvals for land usage and the project itself. They’ve kind of been keeping their heads down, doing the work, getting approvals. It’s my understanding that they’re very close on things. Then they’re going to come make some noise. There’s a history of people coming here and saying, ‘We’re going to build a superspeedway,’ and it never happens. So there is a bit of skepticism that way, people saying, ‘Oh, it’s just another pipe dream.’ But I don’t think so.”
If the track materializes, will NASCAR races follow? Although Waters said the Canadian Motor Speedway group keeps NASCAR appraised of developments, he knows you don’t ask for an event in advance. Of course, there were no guarantees at Iowa Speedway, either, and next year that track will have a Camping World Truck event and two Nationwide races to go along with an IndyCar stop. The Fort Erie project promises to be a larger facility with larger population centers nearby.
“Iowa isn’t the biggest market in the world,” Waters said, “and if they can get Nationwide and Truck and IndyCar, you would think that a market like Ontario—Toronto with five and a half million people an hour and a half away, and Buffalo and all that—could. Is it guaranteed? No. But if you look at recent history, it seems pretty good.”
That also has to seem pretty good to Canadian NASCAR fans who have yearned for a return to the sport’s biggest stage. It’s been a long time since 1958, the last time NASCAR’s premier series ventured north of the border, when a skinny kid named Richard Petty made his first big-league start at Toronto’s Canadian Exposition Stadium, in an event his father Lee Petty won. Is it time to go back? If the crowds continue to converge on Montreal, and if that long-awaited big oval rises from the ground near Fort Erie, the answer should be as obvious as Sidney Crosby firing a puck toward an empty net.
