Pocono Raceway owner Mattioli puts to rest rumors of sale
LONG POND, Pa. – Pocono Raceway could be sold.
In maybe something like 30 years.
In dismissing rumors of a possible sale to Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Inc., Dr. Joe Mattioli said Wednesday that the race track he and his wife own is in a trust to be divided among their three children and then passed on to their seven grandchildren.
Mattioli has often joked that someone could bring a wheelbarrow full of money and he wouldn’t sell the track.
Now he admits the grandchildren could eventually sell it once they get the title to the track, which is totally paid for and has no debt.
“My three children are in their 50s, so they’re going to live another 30 years,” said Mattioli, who at age 83 has a couple of years on the 81-year-old Smith. “When [the grandkids] get it, they can sell it. If Bruton can figure out some way to live another 30 years, maybe he can buy it then, but the price is going to be fantastic. … He would need one of those P.O.D. big containers, not a wheelbarrow.”
Brandon Igdalsky, the eldest of the grandsons who serves as president of the speedway, said: “We have too much fun here. That’s the bottom line. We grew up here.”
Mattioli even joked that he had talked with Smith, who purchased New Hampshire International Speedway in January and has agreed to buy Kentucky Speedway, which does not have a Sprint Cup race and led to rumors of a potential purchase of Pocono.
“I called him up and offered to buy New Hampshire, but he didn’t want to sell it to me,” Mattioli said with a laugh.
Mattioli, who spent an hour talking with NASCAR Scene in his office Wednesday about the past and future of the track, said that the grandchildren had asked about the possibility of selling the track. He eventually had it studied, and with taxes, the grandchildren would only get to keep about 33 percent of the sale and then would have to divide it seven ways. He said the track is making more money than the grandchildren would get if they sold it.
“I used to hear it three, four, five years ago, but no more,” Mattioli said about conversations with his grandchildren. “After I kept hearing it, I had my accountant do the study. The numbers speak for themselves.”
Mattioli relies on loyalty to the France family that controls NASCAR that he would have two dates as long as the track facilities don’t deteriorate because they asked him to add a second date when he already had one Cup and one open-wheel event in the summer. He said it has never come up in discussion with the France family that his track could lose one of its two dates. “They’re not that kind of people,” Mattioli said.
“In 1982, there were a number of tracks that went bankrupt,” Mattioli said. “Bill France [Jr.] came to me and wanted me to take [another] race because they had one on the schedule, I didn’t want it, and I refused.
“Then he came up and said, ‘I really need this to run a race in 1982,’ and we took it. … When I said I didn’t want it, I wanted it but I just couldn’t handle it, I thought. For Bill, I agreed to run it, and from that time, we’ve been running it. Any track that has two races, they were here for a long time; they were here when NASCAR needed them. I know the France family.”
That loyalty with the Frances includes giving the France family, which also controls International Speedway Corp., the first option to buy the track if it ever would be sold. Even though both Bill Sr. and Bill Jr. are deceased, he said that it extends to the current France family of Jim France (Bill Jr.’s brother) and Bill Jr.’s children Lesa France Kennedy and Brian France.
“It would be a cold day in hell that I would sell it to somebody else,” Mattioli said. “And not only that, the way it is set up, I can’t.
“They know that everything that I do is for the benefit of the France family and NASCAR. I don’t worry about Bruton Smith. I don’t care what he does. That’s his problem. My allegiance is to NASCAR and the France family, and they know this. I can’t say that any more emphatically.”
