DONALD LONG
Joe (Albrecht), but there’s no real advantage for
those kind of cars from what we’ve seen.
Just to clarify, there will be no other classes
on the SGMP grounds for this event? No brack-
et cars as time fillers, no other drag radial
classes, no jet cars, no nothing, right?
Right. There should be 50 Radial vs. the World
cars committed, but as long as we get over 32
cars entered, which I’m sure we’ll
get more than that, we’ll be doing
a second-chance race, too. If we get
the 50 cars, we’re probably looking
at between $10,000 and $20,000
to win the second-chance race and
it’ll be for everyone who’s not quali-
fied; everyone not qualified will be
laddered up.
Will there be trackside vendors
at the event?
Very few. We’re looking at Mickey
Thompson, VP Fuels, probably Mark
Menscer with the shocks to keep
everyone going, stuff like that. The
thing is, we don’t want to charge ven-
dors to come because it wouldn’t be
fair if there’s only 50 cars and 500
spectators; it wouldn’t be worth it
for most of them to be there.
With only 500 spectator tick-
ets available, what are admission
prices going to look like?
Well, like I said, this is not about making a lot
of money so they’ll be right about what VIP tick-
ets cost for our No Mercy and Lights Out races,
which I think right now is around $220. They’ll
be less than $250 each, p robably $230, $240, I
think. We’re not looking to gouge anybody. And
normally, let’s say you buy a VIP ticket and you
do get VIP parking included, but maybe you’re
bringing a motorhome, too, and you still have
to pay extra to park it. But this time it’ll cover
everything; if you want to bring a golf cart or a
four-wheeler, that’s okay, too, this will be an all-
included ticket. We won’t be taking any money at
the gate, just scanning pre-sold tickets.
How much will the racer entrance fee cost
and how will the 500 spectator tickets be
allocated?
Well, until I have a count of who’s going to enter
just for this race I don’t want to take anybody’s
money, but let’s say there’s 50 cars coming, that’s
a hundred grand at $2,000 apiece and that covers
the driver and the car. And that’s going to include
everything, everyone will have an (AC) power
spot; we’re not charging extra for a power spot;
where right now there’s about 50 power spots
available and they’re paying $250 or so for one
of those spots.
Then each team will be able to buy a certain
amount of tickets, maybe 10 or 15 apiece, we
haven’t settled on a number yet, and that’ll in-
clude four crew members per car, but those four
will not apply to the 500. So that would mean
about 700 people total on the property beyond
the drivers. I know it sounds a little confusing,
but it’ll mean each team should be able to have
whoever they really want with them.
It sounds like the teams could potentially
buy up every one of the spectator tickets, then,
especially if you allowed 15 each.
Yeah, that could happen, but we think there will
be a couple of hundred tickets left available and
whoever bought VIP tickets to our races before
would have first shot at them.
How many VIP tickets do you sell for Lights
Out and No Mercy events? everybody will have a chance to watch it on the
live show online.
I just don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to
get thousands of people back here just one month
later, because that’s not the idea at all. Plus, I don’t
want to do something that’s going to negatively
affect the February race. If I opened it up just
like a regular race, then people would pick and
choose which one they wanted to attend. That’s
not the idea at all.
We sold 500 at the last race. But we have VIP
people coming from Australia and Brazil and
Europe and Iceland and all over the United States,
so not everyone is going to be able to or even want
to come back right away for this one. I actually
did have people call me from Australia and they
were asking me, ‘Should we reroute our trip from
February to March?’ and I told them not to do
that because there’s hundreds of cars over five
days of racing in February and this one will be
only one class and 50 cars over two days, so it
makes more sense to come all that way for the
bigger show at Lights Out, I think. Besides which, Obviously I could sell a lot more tickets and
make a lot more money, but it’s not about the
money; we really just want to try something dif-
ferent and keep it an elite thing for both the racers
and spectators who are going to be there. I mean,
spectators are going to be able to get with the rac-
ers, see them up close and talk to them a lot easier
than when there’s 10,000 other people trying to
get their attention. Basically, everybody’s going
to be VIP, whether they’re racers or spectators;
they’ll all get free food, drinks, all that sort of
deal and they’ll hang out in the same places and
mingle together. It’s going to be a neat deal.
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