By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
LVSportsBiz.com photos by Daniel Clark
Las Vegas Motor Speedway is Las Vegas’ most massive venue, with a grandstand and RV space drawing tens of thousands of fans for its twice-a-year NASCAR weekends.
But Kevin Camper, the Speedway’s sales and marketing chief, knows the trends in sports venues these day — smaller, more intimate sports-watching social spaces and not so many outdoor grandstand seats.
So this weekend, Speedway fans who wanted a high-end NASCAR racing experience but didn’t need the big space that comes with the venue’s 60-person suites are soaking up the race car experience with new smaller 16-person suites.
Las Vegas Motor Speedway has carved up five of the facility’s 100 60-person suites into much smaller suites, Camper told LVSportsBiz.com at the Speedway Friday. Each of these five suites have been chopped up into five 16-person suites, so that fans with smaller companies and smaller sports event budgets can afford to buy the suites.
It’s far from inexpensive, though. Each of the new smaller 16-seat suites costs $45,000 for the two annual NASCAR weekends, which feature six days of racing (three days each in March and September.)
Camper said the goal is to sell these smaller suites for multi-year deals. Each of these 16-person suites have two rows of eight seats and its own bathroom.
“The whole sports and entertainment industry wants more intimate settings,” Camper said Friday. “We had 100 60-person suites, but we said, “Let’s look at suites that would have 12-16 people. It’s a different model.”
The Speedway also doesn’t attract the 100,000 plus crowds like it used to when NASCAR was a force. It carved out grandstand space to create new premium loge sitting areas a year ago when the new loge and club areas were unveiled.
And now a new plan is to rip out grandstand seating for 8,000-10,000 fans and install new food and beverage metal counters every other row so that Speedway visitors have places to put their beers and burgers, Camper said.
“Unique and different is what we’re trying to do,” he said.
This weekend’s March NASCAR events attract more visitors to Las Vegas Motor Speedway than the NASCAR weekend in September. Camper said 70 percent of the Speedway fans in March are tourists, while 30 percent are locals. “We get a lot of snowbirds, though we just had snow here last week,” he quipped.
That contrasts to the NASCAR weekend in September, when about 55-60 percent if the fans at the Speedway were visitors, while the balance was locals.
But Camper did say adding the second NASCAR weekend in September gave the Speedway a new challenge: “With two races, it’s more challenging to charge the same price for each if you buy the two weekends.”
LVSportsBiz.com did a deep dive Q and A with Camper for Inside Las Vegas Sports Marketing to understand what it was like for Las Vegas Motor Speedway to stage two NASCAR weekends a year for the first time in 2018.
Last year was the first year for the September NASCAR weekend when fans coped with sweltering 100-degree conditions.
In response to Las Vegas’ intense heat in September, the three races will start later so that they will finish under the lights and not put fans through the ordeal of overheating. The September Friday truck race will start at 6 p.m., while the Saturday and Sunday races will start at 4 p.m., Camper said.
The ferris wheel that debuted as part of the “Turn 4 Turn Up” fan social area in September returns this weekend, with eight to 10 fire pits replacing the pool. Las Vegas Motor Speedway has tapped into the UNLV Greek scene and the cheer squad to have 200 student ambassadors at the track to try and appeal to the millennials, Camper said.
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