ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140151
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-8 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: AUTO RACING
DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
About 10 days ago, in an impromptu lunch meeting at a sandwich shop on the other side of Volunteer Parkway from Bristol Motor Speedway, track general manager Jeff Byrd wanted the truth from his builders.
Everyone was working almost frantically to complete the largest single grandstand addition in the history of sport - the 38,000-seat structure that wraps around turns 3 and 4 here at Bristol.
The new seats already were sold for today's Food City 500. Byrd needed to know: Would they be ready?
``Jeff, let me tell you, if this was a museum, we wouldn't make it,'' contractor Tony Pettit said. ``But this is a race track. And all these construction workers are race fans. They've bought into your `Team Bristol' thing. They're going to work 16 to 18 hours a day. And they're going to make it.
``Nobody wants to be the guy to tell these race fans that they can't see the race because he didn't get the job done.''
Byrd recalls how ``even the biggest supporters in the community thought we might not get it done. Widespread panic set in on the Internet. People were saying we sold too many tickets for the seats we would have ready.
``But there wasn't ever any doubt. We printed up a bunch of T-shirts for the 800 people working on the projects here that said, `Not make it? Not an option.'''
On Friday morning, with race cars on the track, workers finished the job, scrambling to paint numbers on seats and install stairway railings.
The story of the Bristol grandstand construction project is just another chapter in the saga of Bruton Smith and his burgeoning Speedway Motorsports, Inc.
``It's kind of funny. This track and what's going on here is the story with the local media,'' said Wayne Estes, the track's public relations director. ``But the story has kind of been passed by in the general motorsports media with all that other stuff going on about Texas Motor Speedway.''
Bristol Motor Speedway is completely encircled by grandstands. There are 118,000 seats, with plans for 12,000 more. The changes, estimated to cost $20 million this year alone, are breathtaking.
Twenty-four of the 50 planned sky boxes in the new grandstand have been finished. They were full of fans for Saturday's Moore's Snacks 250 Grand National race.
In the unfinished boxes sat some of the construction workers who made it happen.
``It's the quickest one we've ever built and the largest,'' said contractor Randy Ray of Southern Bleacher Co. ``We didn't finish until Friday morning, but when we left the job site, everyone had big smiles on their faces.
``That was something new, since everybody had been at each other's throats for so long. I mean, we just about lived here.''
The spirit of Byrd's ``Team Bristol'' can be seen in the work of 23-year-old Chad Baker of nearby Bluff City. Baker moves earth, and his 25 vehicles sometimes burned 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel each day moving more than a million cubic yards of earth. Baker lopped 85 feet off the top of the small mountain that used to exist behind the backstretch.
When Baker first agreed to work at the speedway, Smith wanted 285,000 yards of earth moved. But Smith wasn't sure that this young local man could do the job. Smith insisted on a penalty clause: $2,500 a day for each day past deadline.
That's all right, Baker said, but let's have a bonus clause, too. ``And let's increase the stake to $5,000 a day to make it interesting,'' Baker told Smith. ``If we go broke here, I can walk home. I promise.''
Said Baker: ``We finally threw out the penalty/bonus clause after I had moved about three times the amount of earth that Bruton wanted moved.''
Byrd spent 23 years working for the Sports Marketing Enterprises arm of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He became known as something of a marketing genius.
``I thought I was going to come here and do the same thing,'' Byrd said. ``All I've done is build and buy. All I've been doing is all these construction projects, which I have no aptitude for at all.
``T. Wayne [Robertson, president of Sports Marketing Enterprises,] and I built a doghouse one time that was 14 inches out of square. It was so bad it was a trapezoid. But I know all about concrete and steel and all sorts of construction stuff now.''
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB