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Bristol brings big-time hospitality to its ‘Battle’

A rendering shows planned premium seating behind an end zone at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Photo by: COURTESY OF BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY
Tennessee and Virginia Tech will storm the field in two months in one of the most heavily anticipated events this year, and in the process, they’ll run past some of the most unusual on-field premium areas ever devised for the college football game at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Stadium seating on the racetrack, clubs and lounges on pit road, helicopter rides to the stadium — Bristol will have a bit of everything when NASCAR meets the gridiron.

Pilot Flying J
  Battle at Bristol

Tennessee vs. Virginia Tech
Sept. 10, 8 p.m. ET
At least four premium hospitality spaces will put fans either next to the field or on the racetrack for the novel Sept. 10 game that will be played inside the transformed speedway. The crowd is expected to exceed 155,000, which would be a college football attendance record, in the only bowl stadium on the NASCAR circuit.

But if you’re a fan of the Volunteers or Hokies and you really want to make your friends jealous, there’s only one way to go to the first-of-its-kind game: For $5,000, you can buy the Chairman’s Experience, the quintessential premium package that’s unlike anything in the college space.

First, skip the traffic and take a helicopter ride to the speedway from nearby Tri-Cities Regional Airport. From there, you’ve got your own golf cart for the day to take you just about anywhere you want to go. That includes on-field access for pregame, halftime and postgame; VIP viewing access for the team walk; locker room tours; and pit road access behind the teams’ benches during the game. It also provides you with a seat in a specially built suite, with food and drink included.

The package was inspired by a similar hospitality experience that Bristol started selling for its NASCAR events two years ago.

Only 24 Chairman’s Experience packages are available for the game, track President Jerry Caldwell said, because the speedway wants to keep the ticket highly exclusive.

“We started creating the Chairman’s Experience a few years ago for our NASCAR events, and they sell out,” Caldwell said. “With a lot of the premium, we’ve taken what we’ve learned from our motorsports roots and applied it to the college football world. We’ve got some really interesting options available.”

Bristol Motor Speedway is selling all of the premium spaces around the event and will keep the revenue. Each school sold an allotment of 40,000 grandstand tickets and is being paid a guaranteed $4.3 million to participate in the showcase game.

The buyers of the premium packages so far have been a mix of speedway season-ticket holders and fans from each of the schools. Most of the premium hospitality, especially at field level, was created just for this game.

Rendering shows view from the Bristol Club, a traditional alternative to event-level suites.
Photo by: COURTESY OF BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY
In addition to their own experience running motorsports events at Bristol, Caldwell and Greg “Chipper” Harvey, Bristol’s vice president of corporate sales, began researching the premium options at college football games over the last two seasons. They attended mostly early season kickoff games and postseason bowls — neutral-site events, like their Battle at Bristol.

But one home venue intrigued them more than any other: Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, for USC games. Like the mammoth speedway, the coliseum has plenty of space in the end zones and around the field. One of the ways the Trojans have taken advantage of that space is with end zone hospitality that brings fans closer to the action.

Bristol officials liked the idea so much that they created field-level Touchdown Clubs behind both end zones that mimic USC’s. Each club has a capacity of 436 people at $950 per person. The club and accompanying field-level seats include food and nonalcoholic drinks with a cash bar.

“These are the closest seats you can get to the field,” Harvey said.

Behind both teams’ benches will be the spaces known as the Battlefield seats and the Pit Road Lounge. The lounge runs the length of pit road along the space behind each team’s bench with room for 450 people on each side of the field at $300 per person. These open-air spaces offer a unique vantage point behind the benches, but food and drink are not included. Then, behind each sideline lounge on the racetrack surface, are the Battlefield seats: 1,572 seats per side at $400 each. The speedway is building the seats to follow the natural banking of the track. BMS tested the sight lines to ensure that each seat has a view of the field over the players on the sidelines.

Temporary concessions and restrooms are being built next to the field to accommodate the new seating, which will have a full view of Colossus, the huge video board that’s suspended over the field.

With all of the grandstand seats sold out, Caldwell said these hospitality packages are about the only way to get inside the speedway for the game. The only exception is the Trophy Club, a field-level indoor hospitality area that costs $200, plus the cost of the seat.

BMS is working with no fewer than six event companies to build all of the seating and staging areas, as well as concessionaire Levy Restaurants, which will cater all of the premium areas.

Bristol hosts a NASCAR Sprint Cup race the night of Aug. 20. That gives the speedway and its equipment providers three weeks to transform the facility. They will start reconfiguring BMS into a college football venue almost immediately following the Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race.

Speedway officials didn’t outline their costs, but Caldwell said the game will comfortably turn a profit for BMS and its parent company, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

“This really is a coming-out party for Bristol as a multiuse entertainment facility,” Caldwell said. “It puts us on a stage we haven’t been on before. We’ve been on a national stage plenty of times with NASCAR, and motorsports will continue to be our core business, but this opens up other conversations about how we’ll be using the country’s largest stadium.”

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