Despite Inflation, Nascar Enjoyed A Banner Year When It Came To Attendance

Early in 2022 NASCAR, like many professional sports, was enjoying an uptick in live attendance coming out of the covid pandemic that shut fans out of stadiums, and racetracks. As the world opened, and stadium gates were unlocked fans who had been pent up returned in masse to fill seats and cheer for their favorite sport.

Many tracks were able to report sellouts, including Daytona International Raceway for the season opening Daytona 500, and Phoenix Raceway which announced a sellout for its spring race. Track operator Speedway Motorsports said that Atlanta Motor Speedway’s spring race had its largest attendance since 2014 and Bristol Motor Speedway had its largest spring race attendance since 2017.

But in late spring the economy began to stumble. First gas prices continued an upward trajectory that started as the year began, and the economy started a downturn that continues and could lead to what many think will be an eventual recession.

As prices climb, and household budgets tighten, the discretionary spending families have shrinks, and this normally means live sporting events take a hit.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with NASCAR.

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NASCAR is concerned and has been, of course, closely looking at the economy. One way they can keep in touch with their customers, the fans, is through its “sales academy” which was started last year in order to sell tickets to all the tracks they race at. It allows NASCAR employees to talk direct to fans to sell tickets, allowing NASCAR to hear directly from them. And monitor how ticket sales are trending.

“They are able to have real-time dialogue with our race fans to try to understand the difficulties that we’ve had,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps said of the sales academy.

“I got to be honest, I’m surprised that we’ve seen the type of consumer numbers that we’ve seen. Our consumer numbers are up over 20%, ticket sales, ’21 to ’22, despite what was happening with the gas prices earlier in the year or obviously the very true inflationary things that are happening.”

Phelps, who gave his “state of the sport” address Friday at Phoenix Raceway, insisted that sales for tickets are up and the prices are staying the same.

“We haven’t seen a decline in ticket sales. We haven’t,” he said. “We’ve actually seen the opposite. I don’t understand it frankly. It’s a bit puzzling. We are one of the only sports, frankly, that by and large have held ticket prices flat over the last four or five years.”

In the past few years NASCAR has adopted a strategy of providing more than just a seat to watch a race, and even the ability to buy that seat has evolved.

“I think that NASCAR is one of the best places, from a value perspective, for our race fans, right?” Phelps said. “The opportunity to bring in coolers, trying to keep our ticket prices in a manageable place, having different options for our race fans to be able to buy different levels that will work for their own budgets.”

Phelps said that while they will continue to monitor the economy, so far, the sport hasn’t suffered in the area of live attendance.

“It’s something that we’re going to keep an eye on for sure because we want to make sure that the grandstands are packed,” Phelps said. “We’ve had nine sellouts this year. Last year we had five. We’ll be double-digits next year. We believe that to be true as we bring more races online.

“Again, as I said, we’ll monitor it, make sure that we continue to be a place for our race fans to get a good value for their buck.”

In recent years NASCAR has worked on attracting new fans to the sport while increasing the value for everyone attending races by creating a fan experience.

“I applaud all of our tracks for doing this, we have really invested heavily,” NASCAR COO Steve O’Donnell said. “Steve talked about the ticket pricing. We’re proud of that. We’re proud of our fans being able to come and attend an event, but then really focusing on what can do they do when they come to the race.

“The racing has been really good, but we’ve got to entertain people who come not only just for the race but Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”

Phelps added that the in-person fan experience will continue to evolve and will hopefully keep fans coming despite what the economy is doing.

“We continue to invest more and more money to increase that race fan experience on a weekend basis,” Phelps said. “Whether there are more concerts, more opportunities to entertain the fans outside of what’s happening on the racetrack.

“To Steve’s (O’Donnell) point, the racing has been terrific, but it’s more than that. We want this to be something that they’re going to look forward to all year long, then just have a great experience when they’re here.”

As if to emphasize the point, NASCAR’s final race of the season at Phoenix Raceway was sold out marking the second sellout of 2022 for the track.