Bristol far from a sellout

UPDATE For 55 straight races the Bristol Motor Speedway has sold every seat for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races. That ended today as the ‘official’ NASCAR estimate of 138,000 fell far short of the 160,000 seats available.

The really sad part is that other estimates pegged the crowd at more in the area of 115,000 fans in attendance, that means up to 45,000 empty seats. For over 27 years, the Cup races sold out, during some of the past years the sellout occurred prior to the end of the previous race season. This was the track where folks would wait in the rain, or stay on phone lines for hours every November when what seats were left over, after ticket renewals, went on sale. The first year they did that sale on the website, the internet was crashed over a nine state region. Other years, the entire 423 area code went off line from an overload.

03/21/10 Historically the Bristol NASCAR Sprint Cup races are always sellouts. Not this year where it was clear tens of thousands of seats remained empty for today's race.