Charlotte Unveils a State-of-the-Art Racing Facility

So this is the mecca. Charlotte Motor Speedway is the shining model that race track developers study to determine how a motor sports complex should be built.

“I tell everyone who calls me, ‘Do it better than we’ve done it,’ ” says H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, general manager at Charlotte. “We may be the best there is, but there are a lot of things that could be better. The great thing about a new track is there are no rules, no dimensions to measure. A new track can have a personality all its own.”

Charlotte Motor Speedway is the Taj Mahal. If it were a baseball stadium, it would be the newly built wonder in Toronto. If it were a football stadium, it would be Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami.

Instead, it is a race track for cars, primarily stock cars. But it has all the charms of a major-league ballpark.

It has grandstand seating for 107,281 fans. It has 42 VIP suites, and eight more being built, which seat 3,045. It has press box facilities for 225. It has Speedway Club seating for 6,645 -- 448 of them VIP, another 3,900 in the clubhouse, and the remaining 2,297 on the “veranda.” And then there are the 40 private condominium residences in the first turn, with seating for 720 of their owners’ closest friends.

All of which brings the total capacity to 170,922.

“And I truly believe,” Wheeler says, “if I had 200,000 seats, a few more roads and six months’ lead time, we’d sell them all.”

It is a far cry from the old board tracks that used to be located in hearts of major cities in the 1930s. In those days, thousands of fans filled the rickety grandstands, reveling in the wooden thunder of Indianapolis-style cars of their day.

Then came termites, which destroyed the board tracks, and car racing was exiled back to rural America. Wheeler contends if those tracks had been made of concrete instead of wood, “We’d be betting on stock car and Indy racing instead of the NFL and baseball.”

It has taken nearly 50 years for the sport to grow up and become a bonanza for advertisers, 50 years for it to move from small garages and the back woods to corporate board rooms and major cities.

Motor racing -- everything from drag racing to Indy and Formula One cars to stock cars -- is big business. New tracks are being built throughout the country and the world.

While Wheeler says it’s important that a new structure have its own character, he does offer some basic advice for anyone thinking of building a track:

“You can’t do things good enough for people today. They want the best. You can’t make anything too grand. Look at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami. It is state of the art. Now everything built will be better than that.”

Build the track as a 1 1/2-mile oval, no more, no less. It is the perfect size, Wheeler says. Big enough to provide high-speed racers with a safety factor and small enough to allow the fans to see the entire race course and enjoy the action.

“Race tracks are the last thing being built in America for the fans and not television,” Wheeler says. “Everyone says television money is important, but it is really minuscule. That’s why I keep adding seats (the current project at Charlotte is a 38,000 double-deck grandstand). A quick nickel, as they say, is better than a slow dime. If I was doing a new track, I’d build 50,000 great seats, 20 sky boxes for the corporate buck and then I’d add three to five thousand new seats every time I sold out.”

Study the racing corners. At Charlotte the actual track width on which cars can run is 45 feet. Wheeler says add 20 feet more.

Pay strict attention to sight lines. Wheeler’s goal is for every spectator be able to see the entire track.

Still, there are two things Wheeler cannot convey to prospective developers.

One is the logistical challenge: everything from getting 150,000-plus people into the facility; arranging the parking structure to accommodate more than 33,000 cars, trucks, vans and campers, and handling everything right down to the cooking of the last hot dog. On race day, Wheeler speculates it takes 6,000 people to do it all, counting the local and state police outside the track directing traffic.

The other is the “tremendous effort that is needed” to promote it.

“The first 75,000 tickets are easy,” he says, noting that the Charlotte track has a staff of about 75, plus another 80 working in the Speedway Club, a membership-only facility that includes a restaurant, health club, corporate offices and meeting rooms. “Then you start bleeding. It probably takes 100,000 hours to do it all (to put on one event).”

But if you ask him if it is all worth it, Humpy Wheeler will sit back in his leather chair, in his glassed-in office overlooking his 1,000-acre gold mine and smile.

“What do you think?” he says, spinning his chair so he too can see his domain.