Marcus Smith, the son of visionary track operator Bruton Smith and current president and CEO of Speedway Motorsports, has never been afraid to take risks.<\/p>\n
As the president and CEO of an organization that owns or operates 11 tracks across the country, Smith oversees a lot of projects and has had a lot of input in recent ideas that have come to life.<\/p>\n
The decision to move Charlotte’s second date to the Roval layout was Smith’s, as was the reconfiguration of EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway) to race more like a drafting-style track. While the former has lost some of its luster in recent years, the latter has been a huge success and delivered arguably the best race of the season when Chase Elliott took the checkered flag<\/a> on June 28.<\/p>\n His latest idea, though, may be his boldest yet, as he explained to Kevin Harvick on the “Happy Hour” podcast that he wants to put a roof on Bristol Motor Speedway.<\/p>\n “Yeah, I think I learned from my dad that taking risks is how you can achieve things. So, I have a high risk tolerance level that I’m willing to do things that could make a difference,” Smith said. “I’m not afraid to fail. But the dream, I think the thing that would be awesome to do, and we could do it, is to put a roof on Bristol one day. I would love that. Then, the things you could do there, it would be – you know, we’ve got a baseball game coming up next month in Bristol. We’ve done a football game. We could do WrestleMania. You could have, who knows what, the biggest UFC fight in the world.<\/p>\n “Anything you do at Bristol is going to be the biggest at any stadium because it’s the biggest stadium, you know? In terms of a place you can have a field and be able to see it. If you put a football field at Charlotte, it would be a postage stamp. But at Bristol, you know, everybody can see it, and this baseball game will kind of have that same feel. But yeah, a roof on Bristol would be a big dream. It’s doable. If we can hang the biggest TV in the world over the top of Bristol, we can put a roof on it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marcus Smith, the son of visionary track operator Bruton Smith and current president and CEO of Speedway Motorsports,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}