Kentucky Speedway - Cup Dates or Not

With Kentucky Speedway being snatched up by Bruton Smith, I had conjectured what track is going to lose what date for the Cup series.

Jim Utter of ThatsRacing.com started justifying my concerns with a report that said that "NASCAR is expected to agree to a three-way swap of fall Sprint Cup Series race dates among Auto Club Speedway in California, Atlanta Motor Speedway and Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway beginning next season."

I thought, well of course, Bruton's been making noise about date swaps for track, pulling the Labor Day race from California due to struggling ticket sales that is partially blamed on the hot weather.. and I can attest to that one. I had tickets three years ago but when I saw what the weather was doing, I passed my tickets on to someone else who is more heat stroke resistant. I then sat at him in my 75 degree living room looking at 102 degree weather my buddy was enduring, under the direct sunlight.

The date swap would involve Atlanta having the Labor Day weekend, the Auto Club Speedway (California) date would be the first weekend in October (Talladega's present date spot) and Talladega would take Altanta's spot in the fourth weekend of October. It's sounding like a shell game!!

It was noted that NASCAR was expected to approve the date swaps, then later on in the article it was clarified that no deal is final until NASCAR and track owners have sanctioning agreements.

Well, at least Bruton isn't shutting down a track.. at least not yet.

After the above report I found an ESPN report that conflicted with any type of agreement that would allow Cup date moves in 2009, regardless of track ownership. Of course, Jerry Carroll, Kentucky's founder is already calling his lawyers and I'm not sure why - it's very early in the process and they were already out of a Cup date so there was not ground technically lost.

In one perspective, while NASCAR has been setting the 2009 schedule, no formal request was made for the hoped for changes, being that Bruton was not legally the track owner of Kentucky during the schedule formation time frame.

It's getting pretty tricky and we'll see as time goes on what comes of it.