Kentucky Speedway: The Track That Sued NASCAR

Out here in Sparta, Kentucky, just off Interstate Seventy-One, sits a one-and-a-half-mile tri-oval that took ten years and a lawsuit to earn its place on the biggest stage in American motorsport.

Kentucky Speedway opened in the summer of two thousand, built for one hundred fifty-three million dollars by a group of investors led by Jerry Carroll. From the start it hosted NASCAR Truck Series and Nationwide Series events, plus Indy Racing League cars, drawing tens of thousands of fans to a corner of Gallatin County that had never seen anything like it. But the track wanted the crown jewel, the Sprint Cup Series, and NASCAR kept saying no.

In two thousand five, Carroll and his partners filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and its sibling organization, International Speedway Corporation, arguing that the two groups were colluding to lock independent track owners out of the most lucrative race dates. The France family, which controlled NASCAR, had told Kentucky Speedway bluntly it would not receive a Cup race. The case went all the way through the appeals courts before being dismissed in two thousand eight. Independent track owners, the rulings found, had no guaranteed right to a premier date.

The lawsuit itself, though, changed the story. In May of two thousand eight, Speedway Motorsports Incorporated, the Charlotte-based conglomerate run by Bruton Smith, purchased Kentucky Speedway. Smith had the leverage Carroll lacked: he already owned eight other tracks on the Cup circuit and could trade dates internally. In two thousand eleven, Kentucky Speedway finally got its Sprint Cup weekend, pulling a date from Atlanta Motor Speedway in a deal that would have been unimaginable for the original owners.

Today the track runs a full Cup weekend each summer, with seating for roughly sixty-seven thousand fans in what the track promotes as some of the best sight lines in the sport. The fight to get here wrote a small but sharp chapter in the ongoing tension between NASCAR's family-controlled scheduling power and the independent entrepreneurs who built facilities betting that fair competition would follow.