SMI may expand Bristol seating

Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman Bruton Smith has more than 200,000 reasons to smile this morning.

That’s how many fans swarmed to Bristol Motor Speedway the past two days for the NASCAR Busch and Nextel Cup events.

BMS, which is only a half-mile oval, is the smallest yet most popular facility in the SMI empire of NASCAR tracks in terms of ticket demand and fan popularity polls.

When Smith purchased the half-mile speedway from Larry Carrier in 1996 for $26 million, BMS seated just 71,000.

From skyboxes and an infield tunnel to various fan amenities, little Bristol has continually grown.

And the growth may not be over.

On Thursday, Smith mentioned the possibility of yet another seating expansion during an interview on the Sirius NASCAR Radio show "The Morning Drive."

Smith said Speedway Motorsports officials have studied the idea of adding another 8,000 seats by renovating the area around the third and fourth turns. Smith said the expansion would take BMS up to 173,000 seats.

Smith discussed the topic again during a Friday interview at BMS.

"We can do that [add seats]," Smith said. "I didn’t say we were going to do it, I just said we can."

The Nextel Cup race at BMS has experienced 51 straight sellouts. Meanwhile, the Bristol Busch race has attracted crowds in excess of 100,000 for the past 18 events.

"We’ve done our engineering here, so we know what we can do," Smith said. "It’s going to take a lot of work. We have to tear one end down [in Turns 3 and 4], redo it and take it on up to add the 8,000 [seats].

"It’s going to be expensive, and we hate to tear down anything, but we know that it’s something we can do." Winston Salem Journal