Season In Review: Attendance

Thanks to Jayski.com, I was able to shed some light upon a very common issue in the 2009 Sprint Cup season. This re-occurring problem is attendance.

Everyone seems to make a big deal if the races aren't sold out or not close to it. But, here's the thing, even in tough times, the attendance is not that bad. The first thing that people must consider, is the track size. If it is remembered that there are big tracks, with grandstands all around, it can be tough to fill all seats, especially when there are 100,000 to fill.

Another thing to remember, the attendance is still very large when it is not full to the max. Take the first Dover race for example. There were 147,000 available seats to be filled, however they did not sell out. In fact they had around 32 % of the seating empty. Yet, they still had 100,000 fans packed in at the track. That's more than most stadiums could ever fill.

Don't forget the infield either. In some cases this year, the attendance was higher than the seating, most likely because of the infield capacity. In the first Texas race, there were 176,300 people there, but the seating capacity was 158,000. That's pretty good.

Here's another booster. At the rain delay for the Watkins Glen race in August, the estimated crowd for Monday was only off 5,000 people from Sunday's race. It seems like a lot, but it really isn't. I was attending that race(even on Monday) and I was very impressed in the amount of people at the track. It wasn't even that noticeable.

My point here is this: there is not that big of a problem with NASCAR's attendance. Certainly, it is not exactly what it used to be, but it is still doing pretty good. Don't forget, NASCAR isn't the only thing struggling out there.