Should NASCAR have considered giving fans refunds for Bristol?

Fans know when they buy tickets at most tracks that they are at the mercy of the weather, but that doesn’t mean NASCAR couldn’t do right by them in cases like we just saw at Bristol.

The Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway was arguably the best start to finish race of the 2018 NASCAR season to date. The problem is that it finished way after it started.

NASCAR tried to run the race as scheduled last Sunday, even moving the start time up an hour to try to get ahead of a nasty forecast. It almost got to the end of Stage 2, which would have made it official, but then the rains came in force and required the race to be postponed until Monday afternoon.

It was raining right before the race resumed on Monday, and then it started sleeting right after the thrilling final laps saw Kyle Busch muscle his way past Kyle Larson for the victory. Weather in the Bristol area was so bad that local schools had the day off.

As you might expect, not a lot of people were in the stands to see the two Kyles do battle. Take the number of fans that can’t stick around for a Monday race regardless of the circumstances, add in more who weren’t willing to bundle up and/or brave the cold rain and you had Bristol Motor Speedway, still one of the tougher tickets around even in an era of declining track attendances, looking like it was a Truck Series race.

The track doesn’t give refunds or ticket credit for bad weather — only a few current NASCAR tracks do — but veteran journalist Dave Caldwell threw out an interesting idea on Forbes, which is that NASCAR itself could have stepped in.

"This is what NASCAR should have done immediately after its latest optics backfire last weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway:Step 1. Find out from the speedway how much people paid for tickets.Step 2. Direct-deposit that amount in the speedway’s bank account, so that the speedway could promptly issue full refunds to its customers. They deserved it."

"NASCAR would have lost some money at Bristol, but might have gained some valuable goodwill with a refund. There are a surprising number of fans, maybe even a majority, who think that NASCAR doesn’t care about its fans, especially the old-timers, as much as it does about TV revenue."

Caldwell feels that since NASCAR already got its TV money from Fox regardless of what the attendance looked like, it could have used that to help with refunds. Since tracks don’t release ticket sale figures, there’s no real way of knowing whether this would have been feasible or not.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume he’s right about ticket sales being relatively low because of the grim weather predictions. It’s not like NASCAR would have been covering Bristol giving 100,000 people their money back.

Next: Are Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson headed in opposite directions?

To be clear, no one is suggesting Bristol Motor Speedway or NASCAR itself owes anyone anything. You take your chances with the weather in racing, and that’s accepted as part of the fan experience. Whether it should be or not is the bigger question, one worth pondering for seasons to come.