DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997                TAG: 9704130175

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN.                    LENGTH:   71 lines

CONSTRUCTION DEADLINE? NO SWEAT WHEN THE WORKERS ARE RACE FANS

About 10 days ago, in an impromptu lunch meeting at a sandwich shop across the street from Bristol Motor Speedway, track general manager Jeff Byrd wanted the truth from his builders.

Everyone was working almost frantically to finish the largest single grandstand addition in the history of the sport - the massive, 38,000-seat grandstand that wraps around turns 3 and 4 at Bristol. The seats were already 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 racetrack, 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 O. 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 track public relations director Wayne Estes. ``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 now 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 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's 25 earth-moving vehicles sometimes burned 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel each day, moving more than a million cubic yards of earth, including lopping 85 feet off the top of a small mountain 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 OK, 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,'' he told Smith. ``If we go broke here, I can walk home.

``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 R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. 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 dog house one time that was 14 inches out of square. . . . But I know all about concrete and steel and all sorts of construction stuff now.''

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