Allan Peer, a Southerner, a stock-car fan and an avowed enemy of drivers Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, has attended 11 straight NASCAR races at Richmond International Raceway dating back to 2003.
The streak may soon end as US$4 gasoline takes a toll on fans, many of whom travel to races in fuel-guzzling recreational vehicles.
“It’s pretty expensive,” said Peer while attending a race in May. He has made the 113km trip to the Virginia track twice annually. “I might just make it to one race this year,” skipping NASCAR’s return to Richmond in September, he said.
The stock-car racing league and the more than 4 million fans who attend events at 22 tracks across the US are feeling the pinch of the slowing economy, record gasoline prices and a jump in the cost of living. Peer, 34, tending to hot dogs on a grill and slugging back a cold Budweiser at the Virginia speedway, was without the company of two friends who usually make the trip.
Ever since Bill France loaded his family and gear into a car for the trek to Daytona Beach, Florida, in the 1930s, where he started the biggest US auto-racing empire, stock-car events have depended on fans driving to the tracks and camping out.
Now, after gasoline prices have increased 39 percent in the past year and pushed the cost of filling a recreational vehicle tank as high as US$500, more fans are staying home. Ticket revenue at Speedway Motorsports Inc’s Las Vegas, Atlanta, Georgia, and Bristol, Tennessee, tracks declined 5.1 percent in the first quarter.
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