Watkins Glen Int'l President Michael Printup said he was "glad we were able to get" IndyCar back at the track for the series' Sept. 3 event, adding he hopes by the end of the summer to begin "discussing the future" beyond the expiration of next year's contract, according to a Q&A with Andrew Legare of the Elmira STAR-GAZETTE. Excerpts of the Q&A are below.
Q: What’s the status of the search for title sponsors for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series and the Verizon IndyCar Series race?
Printup: IndyCar, we're still looking. ... NASCAR, I wish we had better news and we could announce an entitlement partner. As you know, Cheez-It pulled out in October, November last year. Great sponsor. Kellogg’s did a great thing (as our sponsor). They had a change at the top in some of their management and they moved their dollars to Major League Baseball. They pulled a lot of money from their racing program. That happens in this world. When sponsors change, a lot of it comes from a CMO level, a VP level or a president level. We got caught up in that. ... We’re down to about two companies we are talking to seriously. We would have hoped we would have closed it by now, but we haven’t.
Q: Since you’ve been track president, there have been a lot of changes to infrastructure and overall improvements. Where do you go from here?
Printup: You probably noticed the party deck at the front entrance coming in. It’s completed. We’ll be opening it up for NASCAR this year. That was a $150,000 investment over there. Instead of creating grandstands, we’re going to continue creating those.
Q: The two Phish festivals [in '11 and '15] were obviously successful. Are there any plans for similar events in the future?
Printup: We found a niche obviously with Phish. We were the first company out of International Speedway Corporation’s portfolio back in 2011 to do a big-time concert, which was Phish then. We’ve hosted some small things here or there, but that was a pretty large opportunity. We want to continue doing them. Phish is a great partner of ours. They only do those festivals every three to four years. Their last one was ’15. Maybe ’18, ’19 we hope to maybe get Phish back. But we’d love to have an annual concert (Elmira STAR-GAZETTE, 4/22).
