Former Kentucky Speedway owner Jerry Carroll happy with legacy, not wallet
Jerry Carroll and the Kentucky Speedway founding group decided not to pursue any further appeals in their antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
Jerry Carroll has used the term “bittersweet” many times ever since he and his partners agreed to sell Kentucky Speedway to Speedway Motorspots Inc. in May 2008.
But it had a little extra meaning Friday after the founding group decided not to pursue any further appeals in its antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp. That decision means there likely will be a Sprint Cup race at the track in 2011 since NASCAR would not allow SMI to realign a Cup race to that track until the lawsuit was resolved.
“I do not want my grandchildren to drive by and say, ‘You see that big field over there with the rundown stands. My dad went over there and tried to build a race track,’” Carroll said. “The legacy will be, somebody will drive by there, and there will be a Cup race. They will say, ‘See that over there. Many, many years ago, a creative guy that did a lot went over there and built that speedway when people thought he was nuts.’”
But that guy is not in charge of it anymore, and he says he lost money.
“Lost a great deal of money,” Carroll said. “Life goes on. You’ve got to go on with it. I’ve had setbacks before, but nothing like this.”
Kentucky Speedway, a 1.5-mile track located about 25 miles south of Cincinnati, opened in 2000 at a cost of $152 million. It was sold to SMI, which was considered a co-conspirator in the antitrust case, in a $78.3 million deal.
The founders included Carroll, who owns horse-race tracks and office buildings, as well as businessman Richard Duchossois, a board member of Churchill Downs Inc.; Cintas Corp. Chairman Richard Farmer; and executives at Outback Steakhouse.
Would Carroll build the track if he knew what he knows now?
“With the belief that we have a market and we were building in the right place, yes I would do it again with that in mind. I believe we had the right market, I believe we had the right track, and I believe we did everything right,” Carroll said. “But in retrospect of understanding the difficulty of getting a race, I would not do it again.
“If you’re an entrepreneurial person, you never want to try to win something on merits and doing it real good and realizing later on that you never had a chance. We never, ever had a chance. Call us a little bit naïve when we got in, but we’re risk takers. That’s what makes this world go round.”
According to court documents, NASCAR, the sport’s sanctioning body, is owned privately by Jim France, the brother of the late Bill France Jr., and Lesa France Kennedy, daughter of Bill France Jr. and sister of NASCAR Chairman Brian France.
ISC is a publicly traded company, the majority of whose stock is owned by the France family. ISC has 19 of the 36 Sprint Cup events at its 12 tracks, while SMI has 12 races at seven tracks. The other five races are held at independent facilities.
Kentucky Speedway’s founders filed the lawsuit in 2005 alleging that NASCAR and ISC illegally work together to keep independent tracks from getting Cup dates. They sought in excess of $200 million in damages and were asking for the France family to sell off NASCAR and/or most of its tracks and for new criteria to be created for awarding Sprint Cup race dates.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling in favor of NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp. in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the track’s former owners.
The founders of Kentucky Speedway had only two potential appeals left: They could have asked for a hearing in front of all of the 24 appeals court judges, and they could have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their chances of success were considered very slim.
“We’re not people that like to sue,” Carroll said. “And we looked at our options, and we looked at everything, and we looked at the judges’ rulings. This is why we have a court system. The deal was, it was time to move on.
“I had fought this thing in my own state and taken some of the heat and had made a lot of promises. We got beat twice. We tremendously believe in the merits of our case. We never backed off. We still to this day feel like we were right. All we were trying to do was create value for NASCAR. We did not set out to do anything negative to NASCAR. We’re entrepreneurial people that have started major companies in our life, and we thought we were doing something good.”
Carroll decided to spearhead the building of the track after a visit to Texas Motor Speedway in 1998. He was invited to the track by Musco Sports Lighting, which had done the lights for Carroll’s horse-racing tracks as well as NASCAR tracks.
The Kentucky track could not be profitable without a Cup race, Carroll said. He hopes to be at the track for future races – and especially the first Cup race.
“We had one big goal, and that was to get a Cup race,” Carroll said. “If you get there in a different avenue than when you started with, then so be it. … We’re not wishing anybody, including NASCAR, any ill luck. I understand NASCAR’s feelings on certain things, and I respect what NASCAR does.”
