Memphis Motorsports Park to shut down; 2010 race dates moved
Memphis Motorsports Park will cease to host NASCAR Nationwide and Truck races. // John Sommers II, Getty Images
Memphis Motorsports Park, which has played host to races in what is now the Nationwide Series the last 11 years and to Truck series races the last 12 years, is shutting down, parent company Dover Motorsports announced today.
Too many years of losses since purchasing Memphis Motorsports Park in 1998 resulted in its closing, Dover Motorsports President and CEO Denis McGlynn said today.
The track will be shut down after an American Speed Association event next week. NASCAR has agreed to move the previously scheduled 2010 races to other Dover properties – a second Nationwide event to Gateway International Raceway in St. Louis and a second Truck event at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway.
“We basically had the opinion that this market would ultimately grow for us when we acquired it back in 1998 and we put a lot of money into it and we underwrote losses for quite a few years in anticipation of some forward progress,” McGlynn said in a phone interview Friday.
“But with this economy doing what it’s doing, we’re obviously going backward here and our ability to continue to underwrite the losses from Dover just got diminished because of all that’s going on in the economy. Unfortunately, we had to ultimately come to this conclusion that we had to stop the bleeding down here in Memphis.”
McGlynn wouldn’t say exactly how much will be saved by closing the facility, which employed about 20 people, and he hopes the decision boosts the tracks getting additional races. The Nashville race will be April 2 as part of a Truck-Nationwide doubleheader weekend prior to Easter Sunday. It replaces the June 26 race scheduled for Memphis. Gateway already had a Truck-Nationwide doubleheader scheduled in July and the second Nationwide race will be Oct. 23, the original date for Memphis.
“Those are bigger markets, bigger facilities and maybe even more viable markets from a NASCAR standpoint,” McGlynn said. “I love the people in Memphis, I love the town, I love the food. I’m just not sure it was the best choice in retrospect for what we were trying to do. So we’re going to try to bolster our schedules at the other two venues and move on.”
Dover Motorsports had planned to sell the .75-mile Memphis track for $10 million to Gulf Coast Entertainment, but the deal announced in January fell through when GCE couldn’t secure financing for its project, which includes a motorsports facility in Alabama. GCE had still hoped to buy the track once it acquired the financing, and the plan was for Dover Motorsports to manage the operations.
Memphis Motorsports Park has approximately 20,000 permanent seats. McGlynn said the bleachers will remain at the track in case it does get sold soon.
“The Gulf Coast group would still do this deal today if they could get funding,” McGlynn said. “Originally, we were going to close in the early spring and they needed an extension so we gave them an extension until the end of June and they needed another extension.
“We got to the end of September and realized that with the economy being the way it is, the longer they push this, they were going to struggle for quite a while to get their funding and meanwhile we couldn’t wait any longer. We gave them nine months to do what they asked us to do and it just didn’t work out”
