The Milwaukee Mile loses 2010 NASCAR races

The Milwaukee mile will not host its scheduled 2010 NASCAR Nationwide, or Camping World Truck Series races. The State of Wisconsin has not been able to find a promoter to handle the 2010 NASCAR events, and there are serious concerns about how much profit can be made by the NASCAR weekend. Milwaukee also has hosted an annual IRL weekend at the track. In the past the track promoters have used the highly profitable NASCAR weekend, to off set the cost of hosting the IRL weekend. That as meant that the track has made little actual profit and a state board has been kicking 1 to 3 million dollars a year to subsidize racing events at the track.

This is another blow to NASCAR which lost Mansfield Motor Park last year, and has now lost Milwaukee along with Memphis Motor Sports Park in 2009. All of these tracks had one thing in common; they were hosting races in NASCAR’s lower tier series, not the highly profitable Sprint Cup series. This seems to suggest that these lower tier NASCAR series cannot sustain enough business to be stand alone series; they must accompany the more popular Cup series to keep the fans interested.

For drivers like Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, and Kevin Harvick who have run full time in both the Cup and Nationwide Series the weekend of June 18th just got a whole lot easier. ON the NASCAR schedule the Milwaukee race dates was a stand alone date as the Sprint Cup series was out west at Sonoma, California. For drivers running in both series that meant a number of cross country flights on that weekend to race both races.

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