SMI's Bruton Smith hopes to have Cup race in Kentucky by 2010
HAMPTON, Ga. – Speedway Motorsports Inc. Chairman Bruton Smith said Friday he is still hoping to have a Sprint Cup race at Kentucky Speedway in 2010.
SMI is scheduled to close on the 1.5-mile oval in December.
Smith has said NASCAR has told him that it won’t even consider putting Kentucky on the Cup schedule until the antitrust lawsuit by the original track ownership group against NASCAR and sister company International Speedway Corp. is finished.
Jerry Carroll, the track founder, has said he has had no intentions of dropping the suit.
Carroll's group alleges in the suit, filed in 2005, that the France-family owned sanctioning body, NASCAR, illegally works with the France-controlled race-track operating company, ISC, to keep tracks such as Kentucky Speedway from getting a Cup date. NASCAR and ISC deny those claims.
The lawsuit currently is in U.S. Appeals Court in Cincinnati. In January, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of ISC and NASCAR without the case going to trial because he ruled Kentucky Speedway's expert's theories were inadmissible. If Carroll's group wins its appeal, the case would then go to trial.
Final briefs in the appeal are not due until Dec. 16. A hearing on the appeal isn’t expected until January or February 2009 at the earliest.
“I talk to Jerry all the time,” Smith said Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway. “He’s tried like the dickens to get it [settled] but we have not been able to be successful on that.
“We will have a Cup race there in 2010.”
Smith, who is buying Kentucky Speedway for $78.3 (including the assumption of $63.3 million in debt) has not indicated which track he would move a Cup race from to Kentucky.
