CNN Breaking: NASCAR's first Hall of Fame is to be housed in Charlotte.

[onehandle]

Woo-Hoo! Atlanta is Spared the Embarrassment of this "honor".

No details yet. Banner on CNN's main page.

[demosincebirth]

1. Is this news?

[onehandle]

2. Big red banner on the web and an interruption on CNN.

Somebody must think it is.

[Bozita]

4. Yup ... BREAKING NEWS ... It don't get any bigger than that!

I love it when my local news announces "breaking news" and cuts to a reporter standing at an open intersection pointing out where a vehicle accident occured four hours earlier.

[T Roosevelt]

3. Daytona Beach is going to fight this

I don't know how, but they want it...

[BR_Parkway]

5. From a tourism dollar standpoint, this is actually big, big news

[supernova]

6. It belongs in Charlotte er Concord

That area around the raceway gets a NYC's worth of visitors every year from all the races.

[rppper]

10. it doesn't matter how many people we get for the races....

thats all of about 3 weeks of the entire year....daytona is still a tourist town, no matter what the city council here dreams. that museum would have meant sorely needed jobs and tax money to daytona and volusia county...which has one of the largest homeless populations in florida and the states lowest per person wages....charlote is a pretty diverse town...so is atlanta...economicly...we do not have that luxury here. bill france is an ass-hat for putting it anywhere else. you have to live here to know the influence he has over the city and county. daytona/ormond beach was the birthplace of NASCAR....nowhere else. the Streamliner hotel near main street on the beach side was for many years nascars headquaters...nascar and the frances own this town.....this is a slap in the face of every citizen who has had to deal with the traffic, rude fans, over priced walk overs to the track that the city paid for, rising ticket prices, bought and sold city councilmen and mayors, etc, etc.......the france's can all go to hell.....did you know they pay $1.00 a year to lease the land the speedway is on? thats right...one fucking dollar a year.....they used 9/11 to justify not letting coolers into ISC tracks(tracks owned by the frances)to peddle $5.00 hot dogs and $6.00 beers to the peons who buy tickets....and they have sold out nearly half of the infield...the poor mans last vestige for race watching...to the RV'ers in 250k prevost luxury liners that can pay the thousand plus a day to park there. my nascar fan days...strained as they were, are now oh-fish-ali over!!!

[MessiahRp]

7. That's some "breaking news"....

Since everyone knew this over a week ago.

Rp

[jmowreader]

8. Atlanta would be a stupid place to put it

There are exactly two places that matter in NASCAR.

One of them is Daytona. That's where the most famous speedway, NASCAR's headquarters and the motorsports museum called Daytona USA are all found.

The other is Charlotte. In addition to the speedway, almost all of the teams have their shops in the Charlotte area. The only ones I can think of right off the top of my head are Wood Brothers Racing, which is in Virginia, and Richard Childress Racing, which is in Welcome. This is probably the overarching factor in putting the Hall in Charlotte--a race fan that flies to Charlotte to visit the Hall can also visit the shop of his favorite driver. (Almost all of them, if not ALL of them, welcome visitors, and some of the shops are specifically designed with fan friendliness in mind...Earnhardt's shop comes to mind quickly.)

Atlanta's NASCAR ties? Two tracks, Atlanta Motor Speedway and Road Atlanta. And they won't even run on Road Atlanta, which is a road course and lots more fun than a 1.5-mile oval.

[Orsino]

9. Especially since the "Atlanta Speedway" is practically in Athens.

:+

[Bombero1956]

11. sorry

but crying that Nascar should've put the Hall in Florida is like a millionaire complaining that he lost a dollar. Florida already have an overabundance of tourist destinations. Other than the Nascar teams shops and the track Charlotte does not have any world class tourist attractions like Daytona USA, Disney World, Universal Islands of Adventure, Seaworld. Besides Gov. Mark Easley is a Dem and the last thing we want is to give Jeb Bush another thing to fuck up.