How Can You Ignore the Super Empty Seats?

This is the Statt Mann Baby. It's time to Scatt a little bit.

I don’t know how you can ignore the super empty seats on NASCAR’s Super Weekend at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

A friend told me Saturday that the lack of crowd at the Nationwide race was almost comical. He said he managed to get from his seats in Turn Four to his cigar room seats in his basement in less than 40 minutes when the race ended. And thirty of those minutes were spent on the freeway just driving across town.

The price on his ticket? Seventy-five dollars.

You can’t blame this on the economy. That’s just overpriced, period. Someone is getting rich here at the expense of the industry’s future. But that’s another conversation.

So let’s take a minute for some context here. Fifty thousand fans in 300,000 seats can disappear. In 300,000 seats, even 150,000 fans can look like a weak turnout.

But fifty thousand or 100,000 is still a good footprint on any promoter’s walkway. You just have to be careful of over reaching, or over exposure or over analysis.

But empty seats should tell someone there’s a problem whether the problem is with the economy, the box office or the promotional model. In short, it’s just as likely the problem is internal and not external.

Peace.