Burton says Kansas may not deserve a second Cup date
BROOKLYN, Mich. – Kansas Speedway might get a second Sprint Cup date, but Jeff Burton isn't sure that the track deserves one.
It was revealed earlier this week that the track’s parent company, International Speedway Corp., plans to give the 1.5-mile venue a second race if it is able to obtain the rights to a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on the property.
The track has hosted one annual Cup event since 2001 and would acquire a second by ISC moving a date from one of the company’s other facilities that hosts Cup events, pending NASCAR approval.
“If you have 36 points-paying races, where are we best served serving the fans?” Burton said on Friday at Michigan International Speedway, site of Sunday’s 3M Performance 400. “Where are the fans best served having us? Where do we need to be? I’m not intelligent enough to say that we ought to be in Kansas versus being somewhere else. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at
[attendance] statistics enough to make that comment.”
A decision on the location of the casino is expected by the end of September. Kansas would get the second Cup date starting in the 2010 or 2011 season.
“I believe it’s in our best interest to be in as many places as possible, and in some cases I don’t know where adding a second race somewhere puts us as many places as possible,” Burton said. “We’d be better off going somewhere else that we don’t go currently.”
While adding a second Kansas race and taking a race from a sister ISC track would leave the Cup schedule with 36 points-paying events, Burton cautions against adding to that number in the future.
“I don’t think it’s in our sport’s best interest to run more races,” the Richard Childress Racing driver said. “And that’s not because I don’t want to do it. When I’m not racing here I’m racing with my 7-year-old. But we have to be careful to not have too many races.
“I think Major League Baseball suffers from that. I think the National Basketball Association suffers from that. We have to have a limited number of races so they mean something.”
