ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 5, 1997 TAG: 9704070136
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROANOKE, TEXAS
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Not only is the Texas Motor Speedway void of cars, so are most of the parking areas that have been turned into mudholes.
Despite the millions of dollars of construction, all of the elaborate preparations and all of the hype, Texas Motor Speedway could not avoid the consequences of a basic fact of nature: it rains a lot in April.
Two straight days of rain here Thursday and Friday have seriously disarranged the inaugural events at Bruton Smith's new speed palace just north of Fort Worth.
Winston Cup qualifying for Sunday's inaugural Interstate Batteries 500 was rained out for the second straight day and a single round of time trials was set for 9:30 a.m. today. The second round of Busch Grand National qualifying also was canceled and a 42-car field was set based on first-round speeds.
Rain is nothing out of the ordinary for the NASCAR Winston Cup series, even when 1.6 inches falls in a 24-hour period, as it did beginning at 4:30 p.m. Thursday.
But the unique problem here is the rain has sabotaged the speedway's plans to park the thousands of cars driven by the 200,000 people expected for Sunday's race.
After hours of meetings Friday with local transportation and law enforcement officials, speedway general manager Eddie Gossage announced about 60 percent of the parking had been lost. To make up for the lost space the track will use shuttle plans that involve carpooling, satellite parking and the transformation of a 6.2-mile stretch of a state highway into a parking lot for 7,400 cars.
``It's not the way we wanted to open the place,'' Gossage said Friday. ``We were prepared for a quarter inch of rain or a half-inch, but we didn't anticipate this kind of rain. But weather is the one thing you can't do anything about.''
The rain started Thursday afternoon as a drizzle, escalated into steady rains overnight and Friday morning and ended with thunderstorms Friday afternoon.
Just before the big storms hit, the radar screen at the NASCAR transporter was the big attraction in the garage as dozens of people came to see the line of approaching ``flashing six'' storms - the most severe possible.
There were reports of tornadoes and severe hail in the storm front, and teams were urged to batten down the hatches. The grandstands also were cleared of the few hundred fans who stuck it out.
The front was expected to move east overnight and the forecast for today calls for partly cloudy skies, breezy winds and a temperature around 70.
Under normal circumstances, there would be plenty of room at the track for thousands of cars. But most of the parking lots are on dirt that was formerly farmland. The soil is soft and muddy a foot from the paved roads around the track.
Gossage said the track is bringing in numerous loads of gravel for the shoulders of the speedway access roads to increase parking. He said $500,000 will be spent for the use of 255 municipal buses and other buses to shuttle fans from satellite lots and the other makeshift lots.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. Joseph LeBean of Magnolia, Texas,by CNBhelps push a truck out of the mud in a parking lot at Texas Motor
Speedway. Several parking alternatives are being set up for today
and Sunday, including the use of a 6.2-mile stretch of state
highway. color. KEYWORDS: AUTO RACING