LVMS officials to assist with big football game at Bristol Speedway

On Sunday afternoon, Las Vegas Motor Speedway president and general manager Chris Powell was tooling around North Carolina in his RV. He was near a town called Statesville. He said the sky was blue and only partly cloudy — Hurricane Hermine had blown up the coast — and the air was fragrant.

Was it “Carolina in the Pines” like in the old Michael Martin Murphey song?

“These look like oak trees,” he said. “But I’m sure we will encounter many pines.”

On Saturday he and his wife, Missy, had encountered a college football game in Atlanta. North Carolina, where the Powells went to school, vs. Georgia in the Georgia Dome. Georgia won, 33-24.

This Saturday the Powells will encounter another college football game: Virginia Tech vs. Tennessee on neutral ground in Bristol, Tennessee. Missy’s people are from Bristol, Chris Powell said.

The game will be played at Bristol Motor Speedway. More than 150,000 spectators — maybe upwards of 160,000 — are expected.

It will be the biggest crowd ever to witness college football in the United States.

They’re calling it the Pilot Flying J Battle at Bristol. A lot of Tennessee whiskey will be served in red Solo cups.

A lot more will be swigged straight out of the Jack Daniel’s bottle.

Bristol Motor Speedway is owned by Speedway Motor Sports Inc. So is Las Vegas Motor Speedway. So after Chris Powell visits with his wife’s folks, he will head to the track to assist Jerry Caldwell, the Bristol Motor Speedway general manager, with the big football game.

Jeff Motley, LVMS vice president of public relations, also will lend a hand. Motley, who graduated from Virginia Tech, said he mostly will help out with the ESPN College Gameday production and try to disguise his rooting bias.

No, he said. He won’t be the guy responsible for helping Lee Corso put on the Big Head.

The Battle at Bristol is just the latest neutral site game to be played in a unique setting. It’s also a way for these cavernous motor speedways to recoup a little of the revenue they’ve lost during the NASCAR recession.

Bristol Motor Speedway once was one of NASCAR’s most popular venues. From August 1992 through August 2009, every Cup race at Bristol was jam-packed with spectators and whiskey-swiggers. Fifty-five consecutive sellouts if you’re yelling “Earnhardt! Woo!” at home.

The race at Bristol no longer sells out. The Dollywood theme park down the road in Pigeon Forge may be a hotter ticket these days.

For the August Cup race at Bristol, the massive bowl of grandstands was less than half-filled.

The NASCAR race at LVMS doesn’t sell out any more, either. Though attendance hasn’t dropped off as drastically as at Bristol and some of these other tracks, NASCAR Weekend no longer is the biggest draw at the 1.5-mile oval north of town, having been lapped by the pulse-pounding Electric Daisy Carnival.

“We are looking for ways to make money outside the standard NASCAR race,” Powell said, speaking not just for LVMS, but for the entire speedway industry. “At our place we call it nontraditional revenue.”

In 2011, Powell floated the idea for a college football game at LVMS before his colleagues at Bristol beat him to it. They had the right venue and the right teams — Virginia Tech and Tennessee, which are nearly equidistant from Bristol, don’t like one another. The only way they would agree to play was at a neutral site.

With its intimate bowl-like setup and high-banked half-mile racing surface forming a natural infield amphitheatre, the sight lines are better for football at Bristol. A sprawling 1.5-mile oval such as LVMS doesn’t offer a natural amphitheatre in the middle.

But where there’s a will and there’s a Wisconsin — or some other team from a power conference with an open mind and an open date that travels well — there’s a way.

When Northwestern played Illinois at Wrigley Field in 2010 and one of the goal posts had to be bolted to the ivy-less outfield wall because the end zone at that end of the field was only eight yards deep, it was decided that both teams would run and pass the ball toward the goalpost in front of the third-base dugout.

So Powell hasn’t ruled out playing football at LVMS — especially if a proposed 65,000-seat stadium doesn’t become a reality.

He also said he and Missy were disappointed the Tar Heels couldn’t hold the lead against Georgia on Saturday.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski