On Monday afternoon, Marcus Smith, president & CEO Speedway Motorsports spoke to SiriusXM NASCAR about this past weekend’s All-Star event at Texas Motor Speedway.
“When asked about possibly rotating the event to a venue that the Cup Series doesn’t currently race at, Smith said: “I don’t know. We had it in Charlotte for a number of years, and did it in Bristol in 2020 when we couldn’t have it in North Carolina. Then, we moved it to Texas for the last couple of years. This event, we had more people buying tickets than we did last year. We had increases in tickets and camping. It was a lot of fun for a lot of people in the southwest region of the United States.
“We’re always looking to make it bigger and better. When we had it in Charlotte, we had some detractors who would always say, ‘Why is in it Charlotte’ or ‘It’s just a warm-up event.’ We move it and people say, ‘Let’s put it back in Charlotte.’ One thing I’ve found is nobody like change and nobody likes anything to stay the same. It’s one of those things that you can’t make everyone happy.
“I learned a few years ago when we put in the speedway TV in Charlotte, which was one of the biggest things we’ve done for fans at the track and we still had people complain about it. We’ve hot a huge team that works to make everyone happy, but there’s some people out there who like to complain more than anything. We really take our job seriously at putting on a phenomenal, memorable event every single weekend. If you look at all the things our team at Texas did t0 deliver an amazing fan experience — I think if you talk at the fans that were there, they had a great time. I saw thousands and thousands of them having a great time.”
— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio —
