About a month ago, NASCAR made the decision to not charge admission for kids who are 12 or under for NASCAR’s two, lower national touring series: the XFINITY and Camping World Truck Series. Now this is not too big of a change because most tracks already have admission for kids 12 and under for about 5-10 dollars, depending on the track. Lowering ticket prices is one of the ways NASCAR is kicking off their "Kids Drive" NASCAR program. The goal of this program is to bring more kids into the sport because they are the next fans of the sport. If you go to a track now, you can definitely tell why NASCAR needs this help because most of the fans that you see are adults. However, while this may make the stands look fuller and you may get more locals out, this will not help their long term attendance.
While this move may bring more people to the track each weekend, NASCAR won’t increase the attendance for their top series, the Sprint Cup Series. In this move, NASCAR made their lower series more affordable for a family to attend those races, but the move does not necessarily mean that it will result in more fans in the future or more fans at the Sprint Cup race. One of the biggest issues with race attendance is that it isn’t necessarily affordable for a family to be there for an entire weekend. For example, some tracks can cost a family of four about $1,000 for the weekend and that does not include the costs of travel to a track and the cost of hotel. That means that it could cost the family almost $2,000 for a weekend, depending on how far they are traveling from. So if NASCAR decides that they want to make tickets free for kids 12 years old and younger, down from 5-10 dollars, you aren’t really making it much more affordable for families. What happens when the child grows to be older than 12? Will the families stop showing up because it has become more expensive since they have to pay a normal ticket price? Only time will tell, but it doesn’t seem like you are likely to keep families coming back to the track if it becomes less affordable to do so. The better solution in order to increase track attendance is more in the on-track product. It would make more sense to create a better on-track product that makes fans want to come back because then they may be more willing to spend that kind of money. However, that isn’t to say that it is a bad idea for them to do lower ticket prices because if you can create that better on-track product, it may mean that people won’t mind that jump in ticket price that would be ahead.
The plan for increasing long-term attendance doesn’t come from the fact that NASCAR is making tickets for kids 12 and younger free, but more so in the on-track product that is produced. While this move will make the races slightly more affordable for a family attending the race for a weekend, it may not mean that they will be in the stands in the future. NASCAR has taken the longest to recover from the 2008 economic crash that affected so many Americans, but also during that time, the product that was out of the track was hard to watch because it wasn’t nearly as competitive as it is now. Now that the on-track product is starting to improve, they need to get more people out to the track in order to make sure that there will still be a future for this sport, which includes the younger generations. This is a step forward for what is the stubborn mule that NASCAR is, but this is not the whole solution to saving NASCAR.
