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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
HEMBREE: Loudon Strange Spot For Major Sports Event
The first race for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship is this weekend...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted September 17, 2010   Loudon, NH
New Hampshire Motor Speedway has hosted NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races since 1993. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
The colors on the New England maples are beginning to tip toward autumn, the baseball playoffs beckon (What? No Red Sox?), the Patriots seem to be world-beaters again, and – oh, yes – there is a race this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

And it’s a big race, the first event in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, NASCAR’s seven-year-old effort to put fire into the closing weeks of its season as it wrestles with that television sports kingpin, the National Football League, and Major League Baseball pennant races and playoffs for ratings.

All in all, this weekend is one of the biggest of the NASCAR season. The field of drivers eligible to win the Sprint Cup championship has been cut to a dozen, and how each one performs on the NHMS one-mile oval will set the tone for the rest of the Chase. An early-race crash or blown engine here can be anathema to Chase hopes. The level of tension is ratcheted up considerably.

How odd is it that this super-carnival atmosphere can be found on the outskirts of tiny Loudon, N.H., a nice enough village but certainly not the first – or 95th – place one thinks of when professional sports is the topic? Quite odd, indeed.

You wouldn’t have a Super Bowl or a Final Four or the PGA championship here. The track was built basically in the middle of a New England hardwood forest, off a two-lane state road 10 miles from reality. In that way, it is like Darlington and Martinsville and Pocono – build those tracks today, and there’s no way they would be in the same relatively remote locations.

Bob Bahre broke ground for this track in 1989, expanding on a road course that already existed on the site. When the newly named New Hampshire International Speedway opened in June 1990, it became the first superspeedway to be built in the United States since 1969. The track’s first NASCAR race – a Nationwide (then Busch) Series event – was held the next month, and the Cup series rolled into town in 1993.

Bahre sold the track to Speedway Motorsports, Inc. in 2008, and SMI mogul Bruton Smith got the Chase opener date with the purchase. Since then, SMI’s busy minions have moved in to do some touchups here and there and to fit SMI’s near-legendary promotional machine into the New England context. That effort has been under the direction of track executive vice president Jerry Gappens, who moved to the Granite State from a long career at Charlotte Motor Speedway to take over Smith’s New England precinct.

Gappens has had to learn a lot about lobsters and skiing and clam chowder and the proper way to pronounce “cahr” in two short years. He had never seen the track before he arrived in town – well, actually in the countryside – to claim the keys to the place.

“When Bob Bahre built this place, it was a ‘If you build it, they will come,’ thing,” Gappens said. “The location didn’t matter as much as the fact that NASCAR racing was coming to New England.”

The crowds showed up, and Bahre’s confidence in the racing fans in the region was validated. These are tough times in the ticket-selling business, however, and Gappens is out in the provinces, beating the drum for his track and trying to convince Red Sox and Patriot fans that there is another game in town.

“We promote, and we let the world know we’re here,” Gappens said. “I was very surprised at the magnitude of the Red Sox Nation and the coverage of everything that Tom Brady does, whether he breaks a fingernail or is in a fender-bender. I’m not under any illusion that we’re ever going to be bigger than the Red Sox or the Patriots, but when you talk about professional sports in New England, I want NASCAR and NHMS at least to be in the same paragraph. That’s what I’ve been working hard at.”
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There are changes coming to the track next season. The Sprint Cup schedule, now more fluid than ever, moves NHMS from the first Chase race to the second, with NASCAR choosing to put the spotlighted Chase opener in the bigger market of Chicago. That isn’t a problem, Gappens said, because he can use the extra time to promote and sell tickets, with his track hosting three races – two Cup and one Indycar – in a span of three months.

“The important part for me is to be one of only 10 venues with a Chase spot,” he said. “Traditionally, with the stick-and-ball sports, the deeper you get into the playoffs, the more drama builds. I don’t care if we’re second, third or last. I’m just glad to be in it.”

Come see Gappens out there in the woods. He’ll be the guy with the big grin and the ticket application.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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