Good seats still available for LVMS Winston Cup

Tickets for the March 7 NASCAR Winston Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway aren't selling at the brisk pace they did for last year's inaugural event, but LVMS officials nonetheless are predicting another sellout.

Last year, all 107,000 tickets for the Las Vegas 400 were snapped up within 30 hours of going on sale.

The Speedway added an estimated 20,000 temporary seats for this year's race and put those tickets on sale last Thursday. As of Monday afternoon, "a limited number" of reserved and general admission seats still had not been sold, according to LVMS general manager Chris Powell.

Powell said he was not concerned that the additional tickets did not sell out immediately.

"We're very happy with the way things are going and we're fully confident we will be totally sold out for the Winston Cup event," Powell said. "We want people to know that there are seats that are available for this Winston Cup weekend.

"But is there any sense of 'Oh, my goodness, we're going to have empty seats for the race?' No, not all. But people need to purchase them as soon as possible because we don't know how long they are going to last."

Many local race fans complained last year that they were shut out of Winston Cup tickets because they couldn't get through the jammed phone lines at the Speedway.

Powell said that when Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports, Inc., purchased the track last month, accountants turned up some additional reserved seats in the main grandstand that had not been sold for last year's race. Those tickets, plus the additional general admission seats added in turns two and three, went on sale last week.

"I haven't been here (long enough) to gauge local interest and I don't know but what people might have believed -- that the tickets were all sold out to begin with," Powell said. "I think the perception within the public domain was that there were no tickets available."

Last year's Winston Cup race attracted a crowd estimated at 130,000 to the 1.5-mile superspeedway -- a state record for a sporting event. With seating capacity increased to 127,000, it is believed attendance could swell to close to 150,000 for this year's race.

Powell said that additional access roads and parking lots were being added at the Speedway in an attempt to handle the increased traffic.

Ticket sales for the Saturday, March 6, NASCAR Busch Series race also are going well, Powell said. Last year, an estimated 70,000 people watched Winston Cup veteran Jimmy Spencer win the inaugural Sam's Town 300 Busch Series event.

Powell predicted that, in time, the Speedway would also draw sellout crowds for the Busch Series races.

"Very rarely do you see a Busch race sell out," Powell said. "That is going to be our main thrust right now -- selling Busch tickets -- because we're so confident of selling out on the Winston Cup side.

"Las Vegas is such a good city to come to, to spend your day at the race track and spend your evening at the casino, that I think, in time, you will see our Busch Series race, if not selling out, then pretty close to it."

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