After reading up on and thinking about the now infamous indoor drag races held in Chicago during the early 1960s, our thoughts turned to some modern attempts to create an indoor venue that could host professional stock car and/or drag racing. All of these modern efforts have gone down in flames before nary a shovel of earth was moved. Fact is, the ancient covered grandstands at Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky are still cutting edge in some ways.
The obvious problems confronting either an indoor strip or circle track was the sheer scale of the building that would be needed to house the track, the pits, the stands and all the other cursory items that are necessary to run an event. Then come the concerns about controlling the quality of the air, mitigating noise, and generally making the place somewhere a person would want to spend hours in. Attending monster truck shows in small arenas is one thing, normally there’s one of two trucks running for short periods of time, but sustaining dozens of race vehicles for hours on end would present challenges we’re pretty sure no one has even thought of tackling as of yet.
Modern indoor professional racing facilities have been proposed in Connecticut, Michigan, Pittsburgh and Ohio. None of them have amounted to much. The one thing that all of the projects have in common is their ability to drag on for years without actually getting anywhere.
We’re most familiar with the Connecticut project which would have housed a 1-mile circle track and somehow a drag strip as well. At the time this project was rolling, the developer had a meeting with the management of New England Dragway and after he got done telling the folks at the meeting about the project and the included drag strip, he was met with the simple question, “Where’s the shutdown area?” That was a stumper.
Residents in the area that the dome was supposed to be built rose up in protest at the mere mention of the facility. The proposed building would have been hundreds of feet tall, spanned over dozens of acres and cost, by the developers estimate, more than $300 million to construct. That and having no guarantee of races from any sanctioning body, let alone NASCAR, which was still spiraling upward when this project was on the table, ultimately killed the deal off. Oh yeah, the place was also going to seat 140,000 people. Right.
At the same exact time that the Connecticut track was making news, another facility, first proposed in the Pittsburgh, PA area and later in Ohio was being pitched, plugged, and promoted. Slightly more realistic in scope, this project was to be a half-mile oval seating a mere 60,000 people. That facility, having half the track the Connecticut project would have had, was still pitched as being 400-feet tall, and the actual “covered” portion of the building would measure more than 40 acres.
The Ohio project first made headlines in 2001 and was finally called “dead” in 2006. Construction costs were estimated at being $400-million for this adventure. After being chased out of the Pittsburgh area, the developer found more moral support (but not much financially) in Trumbull County, Ohio.
A major blow was dealt to the project in 2002 when the developer was told by NASCAR to stop mentioning their name in conjunction with the project. Once that tie was severed in public, it made it virtually impossible to get anyone interested in shoveling money into the construction of such a place.
Outside of the obvious construction and engineering concerns, there’s the economic/business end of the equation which is even more insane looking.
The tracks would have to be built with no guarantee that they’d ever be able to host any sort of large scale professional racing event. What investor in his or her right mind would ever lay money down on that bet? The answer, so far anyway, has been nobody.
If it ever comes to fruition, we’re thinking that it’ll be in a place like Dubai where money seems to flow from the taps, although even there, things aren’t as rosy as they were a few years back. Due to the obvious legal and liability concerns stuff like what happened in Chicago back in the day will never happen again, even though they probably could at any number of sites across the country.
You can hit the link below to read about the details of all the recent attempts at constructing indoor professional racing facilities. Reading between the lines, the developers seem to have made a few bucks along the way, but that’s about it.
Source — JaySki.com — Indoor Racing Facility Proposals
