Where Will NASCAR’s 47,000 Fans Go?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 1, 5:25AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Where Will NASCAR’s 47,000 Fans Go? — © Jeff Zelevansky / Getty Images

NASCAR will restart its race schedule on May 17 with a 400-mile race at Darlington Raceway. The track holds 47,100 fans. The seats will be empty as protection against the spread of COVID-19. What NASCAR cannot say is whether those fans will watch the race on TV, or “skip” the race completely.

Three public companies control most of the tracks in the U.S. Their combined revenue from attendance runs about $200 million a year. For each race run without a crowd, a large chunk of that revenue disappears. So, like empty airline seats on an airline trip, it is money that can never be recouped by the carrier once the plane is in the air.

NASCAR announced:

NASCAR is scheduled to make its return to racing on Sunday, May 17, at Darlington Raceway with a NASCAR Cup Series race that will serve as the first of seven races over an 11-day span at two different race tracks throughout May, the sanctioning body announced Thursday.

The race at the historic South Carolina track will be held without fans in attendance and is slated to be NASCAR’s first on-track action in more than two months as the sport and world in general have been on pause during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The race will be televised on Fox. After the first race, there will be two more at Darlington, followed by three at Charlotte. The stands will be empty of those, too.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.