I was able to be instructed by Johnny O'Connell down at Road Atlanta a few months ago. His take on Charlotte was that the track was fairly "Micky Mouse" to quote him exactly. (If you've never met him, he is quite a guy, easily one of the best racing personalities I have ever met!)
Having raced the road course at Charlotte, I will agree with him. But it was nice to have such a world class race only an hour down the road.
I also had the chance to work at Charlotte (Lowes) Motor Speedway in the Sales and Marketing Dept. as in intern this summer, so I have a pretty good explanation for the small turnout at the race as follows:
Living here in NC, I can tell you that there was absolutely NO! advertisement for the race. I only found out about it from some folks in the local BMW CCA and PCA. It turns out that Panoz structured the event by simply purchasing a track rental, thus the track had no budget to do any advertising and would not benefit from it if they had, because they didn't recieve any of the ticket sales. The blame for the low turnout and lack of advertisement lies solely with Panoz's organization.
I do believe that with the proper marketing, the event could experience good turnout. Just a couple hours down the road, the Petit LeMans always draws very large crowds. Though smaller, Charlotte is becoming the "Atlanta" of NC and should be able to draw similiar crowds from a simliar demographic base.
Thanks for the bandwidth on my first post here!
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Auto racing, bullfighting, and rock climbing are the only real sports...
all others are games.
-Ernest Hemingway
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