Kentucky Speedway-NASCAR lawsuit appears to be over, when track gets Cup date undetermined
Bruton Smith needs to decide soon whether to move a Sprint Cup race to Kentucky Speedway. // Sam Cranston, NASCAR Illustrated
CONCORD, N.C. – After nearly five years in court arguing over antitrust issues, NASCAR appears to have prevailed in its lawsuit against Kentucky Speedway’s founders. Now it’s up to Speedway Motorsports Inc. Chairman Bruton Smith and NASCAR Chairman Brian France to decide if Kentucky Speedway gets a Sprint Cup date in 2011.
France has repeatedly said NASCAR wouldn’t consider moving a Cup race to the track until the antitrust lawsuit filed in 2005 was resolved.
The litigation ended when the founders did not file a request Wednesday for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case. A U.S. District Court judge and a U.S. Court of Appeals panel have both ruled in favor of NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp.
The deadline to mail a request was Wednesday. The Supreme Court docket sheet does not have the case listed and NASCAR officials have been notified by the Kentucky Speedway founders’ attorney that none was mailed.
"By not appealing the favorable NASCAR ruling … to the Supreme Court, it appears that this matter is finally resolved," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said in a statement. "The court found that NASCAR, like other sports, has the right and the responsibility to schedule its events where it decides is best for the sport and its fans."
With NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp. winning the case, it’s now up to Smith to decide if he wants to move a race from another SMI track to Kentucky. Smith has said he wanted to move a race to Kentucky as soon as possible, but the company’s chief financial officer Bill Brooks told financial analysts earlier this month that a race in 2011 might not be feasible even if the case closed in May or June. Potential capital improvements, as well as the analysis of which track to move a race from, were cited as possible reasons why SMI might have to wait until 2012 to move a date to Kentucky.
SMI has control of 12 Cup races – two apiece at Charlotte, Texas, Atlanta, Bristol and New Hampshire and one each at Las Vegas and Infineon. The tracks that attract the fewest fans among those are Infineon, Atlanta and New Hampshire.
Smith had been pressing the track founders not to appeal a December 2009 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit, which affirmed a January 2008 ruling by a U.S. District Court judge that the Kentucky Speedway founders did not have enough evidence for the case to proceed.
The track founders’ only appeal left was to the Supreme Court, and if the Supreme Court had decided to hear the appeal and the founders had won that appeal, the case would have been sent back to U.S. District Court for trial.
Kentucky Speedway, located about 25 miles south of Cincinnati, opened in 2000 at a cost of $152 million, and without being awarded a Cup date, the founders sued in 2005 alleging that NASCAR and ISC illegally conspire to keep independent tracks from obtaining Cup races. The facility was sold to SMI, which is considered a co-conspirator in the case, in a $78.3 million deal completed in December 2008.
The Kentucky Speedway founders sought more than $200 million in damages and asked for the France family, which controls both NASCAR and ISC, to sell off NASCAR and/or most of its tracks and for new criteria to be created for awarding Sprint Cup race dates.
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 members of the France family. ISC has 19 of the 36 Sprint Cup events at its 12 tracks.
