There were several types of fans on the roads leading to Kentucky Speedway on Saturday.
Your attitude depended on how you see the glass. Half full? Half empty? A couple folks I follow on Twitter sort of showed that Saturday on the road to Sparta.
The eternal optimist
Darrell Waltrip tweets, “Bruton Smith owns many racetracks, he will work with Gov. Beshear to get things right,we have a year to make changes,they'll get it right !”
Note to DW – It takes more than one year to fix this problem. First there's $$$, which is probably the biggest issue, followed by engineering. Sparta, Ky., is kinda hilly terrain, which is a problem and will also drive up the cost to build a road. And I told the governor on Friday, traffic for a couple hours at a major race event was not unusual.
Of course, that was before the 3- 4- and some longer wait stories hit the social media. We were in that mess. For about 3-1/2 hours to travel what should have been 30- to 45-minutes on a normal day.
Making the best of the situation
You've heard the saying, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em? That would be Denny Hamlin.
Denny was stuck in the traffic with everyone else. Only that was a bigger problem for him than everyone around. At 3:30 p.m., he hadn't made it to the track for the driver's meeting, which was only two hours away.
He chose to take it all with a sense of humor. He tweets, “20 bucks to the first of my followers who finds me in traffic. Will send pic to confirm.”
“I think everyone should lay on their horns at the same time. Ready Set Go!!!!”
“Good news bad news/ bad news is I'm prolly not gonna make the drivers meeting in 3 hrs because I'm in this traffic with everyone else.”
“Good news I'm starting in the back anyway!”
He also commented about tweeting and driving. "not driving, sir, sitting."
Or just get over it
Every one's funnyman Kenny Wallace's opinion is it's over and done with now, move on.
Bruton Smith is quoted in Sunday's Lexington Herald-Leader saying it's not his job, meaning the roads around the track. That would be the state's bailiwick.
I've been backed up, sorry, sat in my car stopped, on Bruton Smith Boulevard before, maybe 1 to 1-1/2 hours. Not 3 hours. Certainly not more and I've never been turned away because there was no more parking.
At SceneDaily, Bob Pockrass wrote on Sunday, "But I view what happened Saturday night as just plain unacceptable, whether it was the track’s first Cup race or not.
"It’s one thing to have a 2-hour backup at the peak of traffic. But to have the traffic woes getting in – not to mention what has to be a mess in the parking lots and highways now that I write this – but it appeared that no one had ever done one second of traffic preparation (which of course isn’t true). It appeared as if no one had learned lessons of previous traffic nightmares when other tracks opened."
NASCAR spent Sunday apologizing the fans.
SceneDaily's commentary by Pockrass quoted speedway GM Mark Simendinger saying, "I didn’t expect that [big of a problem. We had some rain and some issues related to the parking lots. We got them squared away. Really, we had an unforeseen imbalance of where the traffic was going to come from.
“As the night went on, I don’t know who was still left out there. But they were still coming and the stands were packed. We clearly had gotten tons of people in and yet they were still coming. We’ll have to look at all the facts and the data and try to figure out where our planning went wrong.”
Obviously, this issue is not going to roll over and be quiet and we'll be hearing about for probably at least another week, or through next weekend's race at New Hampshire.
In the end, once you got to, if you got to, the track, it was a good time at My Old Kentucky Home, not so far away for this blogger. Just a couple hours down Interstate 64. Not great, action-packed racing, but live Sprint Cup series racing. A mediocre race at the track is better than none at all.
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