Tracks and Seats By-Lisa Humes Check out ALL our sections and features here!! There is plenty to keep you busy on our main page! We all know that Nascar has become more popular and most races are sellouts. So the track owners started figuring, "OK, let’s add some more seats. Great idea!!! Let’s just build and build until we have seats all the way around the track. Then we will have more fans come, and we’ll have more money." And so they built more grandstands going all the way around. (Except Martinsville, of course.) Well, of course after this great building spree, the ticket prices had to be raised to pay for the construction, until ticket prices have gone higher than the highest row at the track. Now fans can’t afford to go to the races, and the grandstands (that aren’t paid for yet) aren’t selling out. It used to be that races were sold out months in advance, and now there are "empty seats". The worst thing is the dreaded "single seats only". Not many people go to the race alone, and they want to sit with friends. So those seats don’t sell. Oh dear!!! What is a track owner to do?. Somewhere today, I read that Humpy Wheeler has figured out how to take care of the Empty Seat problem. He is just going to take some seats out. Yup, just unbolt em, and they are gone. That solves the problem all right! If the seats aren’t there, you can’t sell them. OK, that makes sense. When you sell tickets to all the available seats, you still have a Sellout, and that makes everyone want to come, because everyone wants what they can't have. Right? I accidentally came upon a better solution when I was at Rockingham last fall. We had a group of 7, with 3 people in row 34, and 4 people in row 35. (row numbers have been guesstimated because I don’t remember the actual numbers). Someone got sick and couldn’t go to the race, so we had 6 people for 7 seats. My friend Gerry decided not to sell the extra ticket, NOT because he didn’t want to sit next to a possible (insert your disliked driver)fan, BUT to be comfortable. Yes, comfortable. Those seats are narrower than the coolers you are allowed to bring in now. My friends are by no means narrow in the part that sits if you know what I mean? So they decided to share the extra seat so people they didn’t know wouldn’t be inconvenienced by their "excess buttage". I thought that was pretty darn nice. And expensive. At $85 dollars a seat, those two paid the whopping amount of $63.75 a cheek or $127.50 per person. That’s a lot of money. Also sitting in that same row next to my friends was a group of five, at least 3 of which had excess buttage, meaning that they exceeded their seats. Now I’m honestly going to say, these people were not particularly fat, but the seats are not accommodating to anyone over the age of 13. One lady in that group stood up (during the National Anthem, no less, but that is a future column) and announced to my friends "I’m not being crammed in here like a sardine for this entire race. If you won’t move over, we’re leaving!" Needless to say, my friends didn’t move over, and the group of 5 left. The really funny thing was, the 5 of them were in 4 seats. Someone had the dreaded "single seat" but decided to sit with their friends and SQUISH UP. So the way everything ended up, the people in the row that the 5th person was in got an extra half seat, not extra charge. Everyone in my friend’s row had plenty of room because 4 seats weren’t used. Me, well, I need to call Weight Watchers and be thankful my husband has a skinny butt. So to all the track owners I’d like to add this suggestion. Don’t remove the seats. Just move the numbers, and let everyone spread out a little. When it comes back to that time when you need more people in the stands, just get some of those diet groups as sponsors, and cram the fans in, and maybe throw in a couple coupons for diet drinks when you mail the tickets. I can take a hint. Lisa@insidethepitbox.com Check out ALL our sections and features here!! There is plenty to keep you busy on our main page! (Editors Note:The views and opinions of our writers are just that, theirs. If you have comments, write to them. We take no responsibility for their articles... Do you blame us?) Article archives Return to the Main Page