Big changes likely for 2011 Sprint Cup schedule, NASCAR Chairman Brian France says

By Kenny Bruce

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Brian France says there will likely be changes to the Sprint Cup schedule for next year.

LaDon George
NASCAR Illustrated

RSS Feed
Email to a Friend
Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size RESIZE
Share
- Facebook
- Del.icio.us
- DIGG This
- Reddit
- Newsvine
- StumbleUpon
53 Comments

INDIANAPOLIS – Brian France says he expects “some pretty impactful changes” to the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule, but did not say whether those changes included a possible Cup date for Kentucky Speedway or which of the 22 current Cup tracks might shift dates.

“There will be some changes as it looks now; now that could not quite materialize, but I sense it will,” the NASCAR chairman and CEO said Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

France met with Speedway Motorsports Inc. founder Bruton Smith prior to attending the drivers meeting at Indy.

International Speedway Corp. (ISC) owns 12 facilities that currently host 19 of the 36 Cup races. Of those, Kansas Speedway has petitioned for a second date in 2011.

SMI owns seven tracks that host 12 Cup races. Smith has publicly acknowledged his desire for a Cup race at Kentucky, an SMI property that currently hosts Nationwide and Truck Series races, but has not announced whether his realignment request includes a date for Kentucky and/or Las Vegas.

The remaining five Cup races are held at Dover International Speedway (2), Pocono Raceway (2) and Indy.

“All the requests [for realignment] are in and they have lots of effects, as you can imagine,” France said. “When anything of significance moves around on the Cup schedule, it has consequences. … We are digesting that, making sure it fits in to our TV partners, fits in to the track operators who have made the requests and all the other partners who count on the schedule to be done correctly.

“We’re on the final throes of that … we’ve had meetings this morning on that. I sense we will be close to wrapping that up in a week or two.”

Smith, who was joined by son Marcus, president of SMI and Charlotte Motor Speedway, when he met with France for more than an hour, said realignment of the schedule, from SMI’s standpoint, isn’t complicated.

“We’ll work with them and be cooperative,” he said. “We think our relationship has never, ever been better. We’ll leave [realignment] up to NASCAR.”

Smith said seating at Kentucky could be expanded (it currently seats 65,989) within 90 days. He was unsure, he said, if the track needed to be resurfaced.

“That’s up to the engineers. I don’t think so, but we’ll study it and see if we do. If we need to, we will,” he said.

Driver Jeff Burton said any realignment decisions should be made with the fans in mind.

“We should be where the fans want us to be when they want us to be there,” the Richard Childress Racing driver said. “I think climate should play a huge factor in that. I think fan attendance should play a huge factor in that. We have some race tracks that aren't as attended as well as others. That should be factored in for sure.”

Burton said he wasn’t an advocate of expanding the schedule, “but I’m not an advocate of having less races, either.

“I'd love to have more off weekends,” he said. “I'd love to have racing on Wednesday or Thursday night a couple times and have a few off weekends because of the quality of life for our crew members would be so much better.

“But, again, we all chose this profession, and it should be based on what the fans want.”