North Country Race Talk

Just read of a rumor that the grandstands and tower were being torn down this weekend at AIS. Thats unthinkable....That place could have been the "MECCA " of asphalt racing in the northeast with the right management approach.. I hope thats not the case

Yea,

just saw that rumor posted on another web fourum site,

Guys -- I talked to Paul today and he is indeed taking down the stands. If he is shutting down he needs to do something to reduce his taxes and if he removes the stands it will do so.

Sad to think that in 2001 the place roared to life with years of success on the horizon, only for it to run dormant only 8 years later.

Although Paul says he plans to regroup and reopen when he is ready - I am beginning to see the ugly look of Adirondack becoming New York's next race track turning a ghost town. Trouble is - Adirondack is the show palace of New York race tracks when it comes to a facility...

why doesn't Paul let someone lease the track? I'm sure theres somone or group out there that would ??

Would love to see that. Heck - I'd be up for it myself, just so long as it means AIS stays open. Finding staff to run it wouldn't be a problem, getting someone to invest their money into it may be.

I would love to see the track open,under a lease,under new management..whatever it takes.so that the dream STAYS ALIVE.let's do what needs to be done,municipal water is so close,never to be a constant issue....I vote no tear down,let's re focus...

I believe what people don't understand on this forum is how high Paul is being taxed on this facility. The taxes are so oppressively high that almost every dollar that comes in from spectators heads out to pay the taxes. The world famous Watkins Glen facility pays a small fraction of what Paul has to pay.

If you worked your tail off (hiring the best in management and promotion) making the track more sucessful, your success would only cause Lewis County to raise the taxes even farther. If you want the track back up and running, your first and best chance was this past Election Day!

I don't believe municipal water (really sewer) is an option, the local municipality would look at AIS as an opportunity to have everyone get free water and sewer on Paul's dime.

Thank you, fiziks, for bringing some sanity to this discussion.

I would like to know what I am missing. I see it constantly on this forum that the only reason AIS isn't flourishing is because of bad management. While I would have certainly done some things differently, I don't think some of the suggestions would have necessarily put more paying customers in the stands. NASCAR runs their Camping World race with a remarkably tight ship, scripted right to the minute what happens on race day. Officiating is reliable and consistent and the races are almost always fantastic. Yet attendance was way down at this year's NASCAR race and the track lost a boatload of money.

Racing at the local short track level is in big trouble, especially for weekly racers. If anyone out there can offer solutions instead of complaints, I would like to know what they are. I think AIS is only one track among several about to go down and am coming to the opinion that it doesn't matter what management does.

I would love to be proved wrong, so have at it.

Keith Zehr

There is more you can do with a facility like AIS besides just racing, have moto cross one weekend , concerts, truck/tractor pulls just to name a couple YOU HAVE TO PROMOTE THE PLACE. On more than one occasion I came across tug hill , stopped at Barnes Corners for gas with the racecar in tow only to have a crowd gather around looking and asking where do you race asphalt cars around here? THEY NEVER HEARD OF AIS!!!! I mentioned to various ais staff about putting some signs up in the barnes corners area and nothing ever happened.

I agree that more, promotion could have been done. But that doesn't explain the low NASCAR turnout where promotion was everywhere, nor the disastrous turnout at the Renegade race. One local businessman told me that if there's not a good crowd with all the Renegade advertising that was done, then there probably isn't anything more that can be done to help the track. The few special events that were tried were also a big failure as far as paying customers go. Perhaps it was lack of advertising; I don't know. I know I was shocked when I heard how much money the track lost this past year. It was an amount that in my opinion no amount of advertising could make up. The current cultural atmosphere is just too unfavorable to race tracks right now.

I do appreciate all that the drivers and crews did to try and make it work. I'm not aware of a single team out there that made any money, no matter how many wins they got. As one driver said, "the only time I make money is when I don't race".

Keith

we are not in to make money...

Ok announcer I can explain the low counts ot the renegade race. Look back to the week before. A truck found to be illegal by track inspectors was overruled by paul. This in turned caused not one but two classes to have different track champions then should of been. That was your main reason for the low counts at the renegade. As for the special events I was a large part of the demolition derbies the first one was pretty good paul said he made alot of money, the second one not as much. We tried to advertise and we got the story "there is no money to advertise." What are you suppose to do??!! This is the million dollar question what can we do to help the track???

Are you talking about crowd counts or car counts? I know about the low car count and boycott effort which appears to have been very effective. But I'm not convinced that explains by itself the low spectator count, unless you consider the fact that several crews buy paid admissions each week, which is exactly the problem: there are not enough paying customers outside of the competitors themselves. I'm not sure how many in the general crowd were even aware of the controversy as the crowd on Sept. 19 when the tech question came up was one of the lowest of the year.

But I could be wrong.

I was in the office when I heard Paul order $1000 worth of signs for the second demo derby. But I don't know if they ever got put up. I was also upset when I wanted to hand out flyers for the Renegade race at the Oswego ROC but they never got printed. But then I guess I could have printed up something myself and taken them. Maybe that's what all this will eventually come down to - doing it ourselves.

Let's back up to May and remind ourselves of the Military Appreciation Day (MAD) race. I worked countless hours putting tegether and printing my own flyers to distribute to Fort Drum to advertise the MAD race weekend. I was told by Paul that last year was a huge success, with about 1,000 fans in attendance, and he wanted the flyer to advertise the same this year that it advertised last year. So, that meant that soldiers, spouses and their kids would get in free for that race night, with the idea that if they liked the show, they would be back again, and they would tell their friends how great the racing was, and more friends would show up. The power of "word of mouth" advertising would far exceed any money lost on admission fees for that one night. Especially if it was such a great sucess after last year. This year, the soldiers showed up and were met at the gate with some sort of admission fees. I'm not going to quote any rates charged because I'm not 100% sure. But one of my soldier friends said he got in free, but had to pay half price for his wife, and regular admission for his 3 kids. He wasn't upset about paying as much as he was upset about the falsely advertised admission rates. If you advertise $5 fan appreciation night, then charge them $10 at the gate, how many of those fans do you think will come back? How many of them will tell their friends and family to go to AIS to watch a race? I think enough soldiers spread the word around Fort Drum that a lot of soldiers boycotted AIS this year. I'm not saying that all of Fort Drum boycotted, but I couldn't get any of my friends to come back to AIS after the MAD race admissions fiasco.

Now let's turn our attention to the race fans who are more educated about racing than most people realize. They know which cars and trucks are "overly competetive", and I'm not talking about Cloce, Mooney, or any of the sport compact drivers. The fans hate to see favoritism, and no offense to the regular weekly winners who can drive their butts off and have done their homework, but some fans are easily bored by watching the same driver win week after week. The example I've given before is that the 2009 Nascar Sprint cup season has been much more exciting that the 2008 season because we have seen many more drivers visit victory lane this year. 2008 was all about 3 different drivers dominating and winning about 30 of the 36 races.

Even if the fans don't know all the facts about what goes on behind the scenes, if they form a perception that things are messed up, they won't come back. Many of us drivers have spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars trying to promote the track over the years and it doesn't seem to help. So, I don't have any more suggestions. Even simple things like updating the points every week weren't getting don't until the day before the next race, even if that was a 2 week break.

Like so many others out there, I am scratching my head. I love AIS, and I hate to see it go under, but it just seemed like AIS self destructed over the course of the 2009 season. There's little any of us can do to fix what the politicians do about the high taxes. I think that is as wrong as a child molester... it should be considered a criminal act! Maybe our local governments should fix their deficit by fixing their spending habits rather than finding ways to charge more taxes to businesses and citizens!

All good and valid points, Todd - except perhaps for excluding Tommy and JR who won their divisions by far more than Greg did! I wish I knew what went wrong on military night. One ticket taker said some people were showing credentials and then trying to get their friends in for free. Whether that was immediate family or not, I don't know. Sounds like it might have been.

If the track is to re-open, two things would help: some kind of operations manager who can watch these kinds of promotional details and prepare ahead of time and then make on the spot decisions on race night if needed. As written on another thread, Paul was often out taking care of physical plant issues and wasn't in the tower all that much. On NASCAR night he was out helping to park cars all night and direct traffic. Of course such a person would likely need to be paid, and there we're up against the money issue again. The other thing would be a trusted driver representative for the track. As the year went on, the gap between track management and drivers became too large as postings on this website have shown. No amount of posting and "explaining" is going to be effective at this point.

The track is closed now for the short term but I think it will re-open again sometime in the future. There's too much invested in it to drop it permanently. After being given up for dead, Spencer is getting a repaving job and Albany-Saratoga is going to asphalt next year. I'm not sure what's going to happen at Oswego and Lancaster, but I don't think we've heard the last from AIS.

Keith