Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504180061
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRUCE STANTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Imagine getting up early Sunday morning and loading the family into the four-door sedan. The destination is Martinsville Speedway.
The trip starts with a breakfast buffet at a nearby restaurant, and then you're off to the speedway. You talk with your wife and kids about who the winner will be. You and the kids like Earnhardt; she's definitely a Gordon fan.
For mile after mile, you and the family roll merrily along, up a hill and down another. Until ...
Traffic jam. We mean bumper to bumper. A total standstill.
It's 10 a.m., and the race starts at noon. The clock-watching begins, as does a slow burn in your stomach. Maybe you'll make the race on time, and maybe you won't. And maybe you'll never do this again.
Because of scenarios such as this one, Martinsville Speedway has made efforts to relieve the congestion from the freeways near the race track and the tension from race fans.
After conducting a survey during the Goody's 500 in September, the speedway decided to spend more than $100,000 to create a new entrance to its parking areas. The entrance will accommodate approximately 36 percent of the race traffic and keep it from mingling with other traffic.
``If I was sitting 10 miles out and listening to MRN [the Motor Racing Network] when the race started, I would be hot,'' said W. Clay Campbell, president of Martinsville Speedway. ``That's why we've spent $100,000 to get this thing put in.''
The new entrance, which will be used for the first time for Sunday's Hanes 500, is located off U.S. 58 to the east of the speedway. It will accommodate traffic flowing in from Danville and other areas east of the track. Vehicles will be routed onto state highway 976 and into a new parking area recently purchased by the speedway. Most of the money spent by the speedway was to connect U.S. 58 with 976, and the connection will be used only twice a year - for Winston Cup races.
With the westbound traffic eliminated from U.S. 58, the bottleneck where it meets the U.S. 220 bypass will not be as congested. With most of the traffic from the Roanoke area being routed onto U.S. 58 off the bypass, the majority of the U.S. 220 traffic will be flowing in from North Carolina and other areas south of Martinsville.
``You're talking about a major reduction in traffic flow,'' Campbell said. ``That's pretty substantial when you keep that 36 percent from coming in with everything else.''
Said Dick Thompson, the speedway's vice president of corporate communications: ``In the past all our traffic from Danville, Roanoke and North Carolina met in the same place, and you talk about chaos.''
Martinsville always has attracted big crowds for its Winston Cup races, and traffic flow has been a complaint for years.
``That was a major reason we did this,'' Campbell said. ``Fans are only going to put up with so much inconvenience, then they'll stop coming. Fans might not know where they're going this time, but they can rest assured they are going the quickest way possible to the speedway.''
The new entrance to the track is the latest of several projects planned. The next will be to transform 50 acres of recently purchased land into parking areas. The speedway also will expand the Clay Earles Tower in turn 2 by 5,000 seats and will construct suites above the tower.
But the traffic flow and parking areas are the top priority.
``At a race track, you sell a person a memory,'' Thompson said. ``When you go to any place you attend something, and when you leave there, you have that memory.
``If that memory was bad, if you were hung in traffic or had bad food, then that's what you'll carry with you. The race fans are really the most knowledgeable fans, and you must do the best and give them the best you can. You live on a memory, and repeat business is what keeps us going.''
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB