Sorry to hijack this Farmer City thread with my thoughts on the economics of Sprint Car racing, like I have done. Again, none of this is directed at FC, they just happen to be the topic that started it. My thoughts are about the broader question of long-term, who pays for us to race Sprint Cars.

If 30 cars pay $50 that's $1,500 for the track. If that same track is charging $15 to get in the grandstand, that's 100 fans worth of revenue. If each of those 30 drivers would just help promote the show and drag 3 more fans to the races to watch them, they have basically saved themselves the need for an entry fee.

A pretty fair estimate at shows I've been involved in is that roughly 75% of all revenue generated at a race track goes back to pay or insure the racer. We always harp on our MOWA guys about how if they get people to the race track, that in the long run they will be racing for better purses and better pay. If they don't help get fans to the race track in the long run, they are going to be paying more and more of the cost of the show.

What probably isn't fair is that if the racers work hard to drag fans to the track, and the promoter hits a big home run the racers don't get to participate in the upside on account of the effort. That's why you don't see racers promoting shows that hard - what's in it for them in the short term?

For the sake of discussion, I've always wanted to try a show that paid the racers a set percentage of the track revenue for the night to give them more incentive to help promote the shows.... or even base the payout on the total number of people at the event. Share some of the risk as well as some of the upside. I've been told over and over again that it wouldn't work. As a promoter, I would give up a large percentage of the big nights, as long as it also took out some of the sting of the bad nights.

But... I bet if I advertised a show that paid 1,000 to win if a certain number of people attended, $2,000 if another threshold was met, $3000 at another threshold etc.... that I'd be pulling teeth to get racers to show up because everyone would call it a $1,000 to win show that's not paying them enough.

Anybody seen this done before? We always see tracks set purses based on the number of cars who show up - which is basically setting a purse based on the back gate. Has it ever been done where the purse adjusts based on the total number of people in the house - both front and back?