This week’s Pilot Flying J Battle at Bristol college football game will mark the first time a major stick-and-ball event has been held at Bristol Motor Speedway in more than 50 years, but it likely won’t be the last.
English Premier League soccer clubs and hockey properties are among the entities that have talked to Bristol, site of Saturday’s Virginia Tech-Tennessee football game, about hosting future games there, sources said. While declining to confirm candidates, Jerry Caldwell, the speedway’s executive vice president and general manager, confirmed that the track is in discussions about hosting additional football games and other sporting events there.
“We are interested in more games, and we’ll see what those matchups are as we go along,” said Caldwell, who has been preparing for this week’s game for three years. “We’re having some really interesting conversations now with some other matchups, and hopefully we’ll be able to put some stuff together in the near term.”
Marcus Smith, president and CEO of track owner Speedway Motorsports Inc., said last week that he’s open to holding all sorts of events at Bristol and threw out possibilities ranging from the NHL Winter Classic to WWE Wrestlemania to a UFC or boxing card. He added that the conversations SMI is having over future events at Bristol are for 2017 and 2018.
“The Battle at Bristol is going to show off really what can be done at Bristol Motor Speedway outside of a NASCAR and NHRA weekend,” Smith said. “We’ve already had a significant number of calls of interest from other types of events.”
Both Smith and Caldwell said they don’t have a set number of events that they’d want to hold annually at Bristol, though Smith said that SMI will focus on pre-eminent properties and that “it’s not something that I envision us doing on a multiple-times-a-year basis.”
To fully capitalize on the conversion to a more than 150,000-seat football stadium, Bristol is holding a second college game a week after the Battle at Bristol between local schools East Tennessee State and Western Carolina. While the majority of its staff homes in on the Battle at Bristol, the speedway has a separate, smaller portion of its staff working specifically on the ETSU-WCU game, a model it could look to with future events.
Smith said he will head to Bristol this Wednesday with his father, SMI Executive Chairman Bruton Smith, to oversee final preparation for the Battle at Bristol — something that they’ve had in mind for a decade.
“You’re going to see how Bristol lends itself to multiple sports; it’s not too big — it’s certainly bigger than a football stadium — but it’s not as big as one of our mile-and-a-half tracks,” Smith said. “This is about hosting the biggest football game ever and wanting to execute it at a level where it leaves everyone wanting more.”
