Opinions vary about Martinsville's future

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – There’s nothing like walking into the middle of a movie.

After sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for one hour, 20 minutes trying to get into Martinsville Speedway Sunday morning, the first thing I heard when I walked into the press box was track president Clay Campbell on an audio feed from the downstairs media center.
He didn’t sound happy.

Taped to the back of the press room door was a sign telling me what was going on. At 10 a.m., Campbell commenced an effort to “address recent, persistent, unfounded and irresponsible stories and rumors about Martinsville’s demise.”

“Unfounded” and “irresponsible” are strong words, and within just a few minutes I was told the flash point for this rebuttal was a column on nascar.com written by David Caraviello. Click here for a link to that story if you want to read it in its entirety.

If you’ll take the time to go to that link and go all the way to the bottom, you will see a tagline on the bottom that says the opinions expressed there are solely those of the writer.

That’s what Caraviello is paid by NASCAR.com to do – express an opinion. That doesn’t give him carte blanche, of course. A good columnist is still responsible and his opinions are founded in fact. But the nature of opinion is that people have the right to agree or disagree, and it’s perfectly understandable that Campbell and the folks at Martinsville Speedway wouldn’t agree with what Caraviello wrote.

That, however, also doesn’t mean Caraviello is necessarily wrong, either.

I don’t agree with some of what’s in the column either. “Compared to most other race tracks in NASCAR, the place is a dinosaur,” Caraviello wrote. “And we all know what happens to dinosaurs. They go extinct.”

Martinsville is not a dinosaur. Campbell and the capable staff who works with him have done a remarkable job of striking a unique balance between the old and new schools. This .526-mile track has grown markedly as the sport has grown around it, but it still also has managed to maintain a small-town charm that makes a weekend here fell as much like the centerpiece event at a county fair. And I think there should be room in the sport for that.

That having been said, though, Caraviello is right on when he writes that the prospect of new tracks in places like the Pacific Northwest, New York City or Denver are bad omens for a track in a market as small as this one is.

While it is petty to try to make it a big deal that Martinsville doesn’t have paved parking lots, it’s not to correctly note that a lot of big-time sponsors don’t bother with hospitality here. It is hard to get people here from any significant distance.

I stayed at the nearest major commercial airport, near Greensboro, N.C., this weekend and drove 42 miles each way each day. You can stay in Danville, Va., which is a little closer, but unless you’ve been doing it for a couple of generations, good luck finding a hotel room in Martinsville itself. It would have taken me maybe half the time it did to get to my parking spot if guards weren’t standing, arms crossed and scowls affixed, across the logical place to enter while hundreds of cars were directed around the posterior to get to the elbow to get to where they should have been going.

“Right now, it's a race track being saved by red tape,” Caraviello writes. If International Speedway Corporation does ever overcome opposition and get a track built somewhere else, especially if that new track is a short track, Caraviello is right to say that the clock is ticking here.

It’s not irresponsible to point out that Martinsville is in a vulnerable spot. You could argue all day that other tracks deserve to lose a date before this one does, but that doesn’t mean that’s what would happen.

Clay Campbell and his staff have a strongly vested interest in keeping Martinsville out of the discussion when it comes to where Nextel Cup dates for future tracks might come from. But their enemy in that fight is not a columnist like Caraviello who effectively presents the opposite argument and backs that up with things that are rooted in his more objective reality.