Bristol Motor Speedway (BMS), a NASCAR racing company, proposes to expand the current Fairground and Speedway track to fit NASCAR vehicles.

  • It would mean bringing louder cars, traffic, and larger crowds to the neighborhood where we live. CARE came together to tell our elected officials enough is enough.

Millions of dollars in taxpayer monies are wrapped up in the proposal to fundamentally change makeup of our neighborhood.

  • The Nashville Convention Visitors Corp, using city tax revenue, and the Tennessee State Legislature have each submitted $17M in funding for the project. Millions more are being loaned from the city to BMS through a Sports Authority bond to complete destruction of parts of the historic fairground and the expansion of the track to fit NASCAR vehicles.
  • By their own admission, racing is a struggling industry. There’s a serious chance we get stuck with the bill in the long run all while having to bear the burden of noise, traffic, and more partygoers in the meantime.

Nashville’s racing fans already have another great option.

  • An existing NASCAR-compatible track sits a mere 36 miles from the city. There’s no reason to bring racing into Nashville as we continue to struggle with the effects of an overflow of tourists and partygoers.

Races are already extremely loud — NASCAR vehicles are the loudest cars in racing.

  • BMS Vice President Jerry Caldwell, and the company’s sound expert, admitted these events will be louder than anything we experience now – even with updated sound mitigation.
  • Sound from these races will carry further throughout the city than anything that takes place at the Fairgrounds currently.
    • The noise study funded by Bristol admits that disruptive NASCAR noise would reach far beyond the existing sound footprint. Find out how the racetrack expansion would affect your neighborhood here.

Historic aspects of the original track will be torn down to allow NASCAR Sprint Cup races to be held at the Fairground.

  • The proposal doubles the size of the grandstands to accommodate 30,000 visitors.
  • Are we willing to pave over our historic landmarks at the expense of Nashville residents simply to raise the tourist profile of our city?

There is no mention in the proposal of how BMS would help manage traffic for a 30,000-person event.

The company, Bristol Motor Speedway, will have sole operational and financial oversight into the facility, despite the millions of dollars of public money going into the deal, bringing between 85 and 100 events days to the track.

  • BMS obtains rights to 10 multi-day race weekends, four of which will be week-long events, 20 undefined events like concerts, and 20 practice days, while the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp gets an additional 20, possibly multi-day, events bringing downtown partying to the neighborhood.
  • The agreement allows events to run as late as 10PM at night.
  • The lease agreement runs for a term of 30 years entitling Bristol Motor Speedway to an existing and potentially expanding piece of our community for decades to come.

Pressing issues like increasing affordable housing, fixing decaying infrastructure and public transit, and approaching the problems of homelessness and crime need our attention and funding urgently. Another project that puts Nashville residents, their pocketbooks, and the future of our children on the line to promote more partygoers and weekend tourists does us all a disservice. It marks just one more step in the wrong direction for the future of Nashville.