DOVER — To the untrained eye, NASCAR races are simple: the fastest driver wins. But for Mike Bagley, who grew up listening and watching races at Dover Motor Speedway, it’s a lot more nuanced. For example: take the car, designed to hit 800 horsepower and speeds as high as 200 mph. With the wind pushing
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DOVER — To the untrained eye, NASCAR races are simple: the fastest driver wins. But for Mike Bagley, who grew up listening and watching races at Dover Motor Speedway, it’s a lot more nuanced.
For example: take the car, designed to hit 800 horsepower and speeds as high as 200 mph. With the wind pushing against a car, draining fuel and slowing down the car, it takes a skillful hand at the wheel.
When you get an understanding of the vehicles and how they are customized to a driver’s skill set and pair that with one of the steepest banked turns (24 degrees) on the NASCAR circuit, Dover Motor Speedway has earned its nickname “Monster Mile” in spades.
“That really sets up the man-versus-machine storyline. Who’s going to give first, the driver or the car? It’s always been a war of attrition at Dover, because you didn’t know who’d make it,” said Bagley, a Milford native who is a NASCAR commentator and Sirius XM show host.
Each left turn is different from the last, and over time, each decade at Dover Speedway has seen an evolution in Kent County and NASCAR itself. After 54 years, the track has undergone many transformations.
But for Mike Tatoian, the president and CEO of Dover Motor Speedway, operator of the track, the excitement of race day is one thing constant after all this time.
“The best way I would equate it is, does a child ever get tired of Christmas?” Tatoian said. “I think it was, and still is, a major event. We’re still the fastest oval track in the sport, and there’s nothing like it in the world.”
Revving up
With a legacy in harness horse racing, the Dover racetrack was first envisioned as a premiere horse race arena by then-Attorney General David P. Buckson in 1967. He bought 160 acres of farmland at U.S. Route 13 and Leipsic Road for $350,000, later adding 600 acres.
But after financial woes, Buckson partnered with business magnate John Rollins and construction company owner and auto race enthusiast Melvin L. Joseph to see it cross the finish line. In 1969, the first NASCAR race was held in the First State, with superstar Richard Petty winning the day.
Those early years were hard ones for Dover Speedway and its accompanying casino, Dover Downs, according to retired Dover Motorsports President and CEO Denis McGlynn. Brought on in the early 1970s as a publicist, he said the excitement with the fans was electric, but little profit was made.
“I’m not so sure I would have jumped into it if I was older,” McGlynn said. “But I was young enough to want to work in sports somehow .And a lot of us were naive not to worry too much down the road. If it weren’t for John Rollins, the place would have gone under before the end of the 1970s. But he kept investing into it.”
The grandstands were wooden and could seat up to 20,000 people. But attendees like Bagley, who came to his first race at 5 years old, said there was enough room that “a cannon could be fired and it wouldn’t hit a soul.”
Dover Speedway’s saving grace was the cult following NASCAR had among blue-collar workers, and it was common to see families from Pennsylvania, Virginia and even North Carolina before RVs were commonplace.
By 1979, there was a game change: CBS inked a deal to air the entire Daytona 500 race and the ratings were strong enough to bring more networks like ESPN and Ted Turner assets like TNT and TBS within the next two years. Dover Speedway added a second race, and the company was off and running.
PHOTO COURTESY OF REUTERS/MATTHEW O’HAREN/USA TODAY
“Believe me, I don’t think we were making a profit until 1986,” McGlynn said. “But we really started to grow the NASCAR product up until 2000.”
‘Blue-collar heroes’ & slot machines
By 1989, Dover Motorsports added more seats to the grandstand, and kept adding them throughout the year. At its zenith in 2001, Dover Speedway had 135,000 seats – ranking it among the largest in the mid-Atlantic region.
The next decade boomed for NASCAR with marquee names like Dale Earnhart and Rusty Wallace, drawing in younger fans from all over. But more importantly, Bagley said, the drivers were relatable to the average Joe.
“We’ve always loved fast cars and the drivers able to do this, but it did feel like these were blue-collar heroes. Guys you could get a beer with,” he said.
Meanwhile in the boardroom, Dover Motorsports had been fighting for years to legalize slot machines to complement horse racing. After the law passed in 1994, 500 machines were added at Dover Downs. Eventually, it grew to 3,200 machines, with revenue funding the horse racing purse and building the resort hotel.
“That grew like wildfire because at the time, it was just us and Atlantic City,” McGlynn said.
To cap off the prosperity in the 1990s: Dover Downs Entertainment Inc., the parent company of both the casino and the racetrack, debuted on the stock exchange.
Shock to the system
As a public company, Dover Motor Sports acquired the Long Beach Grand Prix and other race tracks in Southern Illinois, Memphis and Nashville. Other races were launched in Denver and the St. Petersburg Grand Prix, which is running today.
But the tide would turn with the new millennium. Dale Earnhart Sr. died in a fatal crash racing the Daytona in February 2001, which shocked the sport.
“Picture golf without Tiger Woods. That was NASCAR without Earnhart,” McGlynn said. “That was a seismic shift. You saw a lot of the drivers at the time decide to get out, so we lost some of those fans that came for the stars.”
NASCAR responded by rolling out a different design for the stock car chassis to make them safer but taking away the car model’s identity. That turned off some car enthusiasts. That started a slow drain, McGlynn said, and in 2008 the “bottom fell out” when the recession wiped out NASCAR fans’ disposable income.
A bigger problem was older fans stopped bringing in their children and grandchildren, and companies couldn’t write off marketing expenses.
“The economic challenges have been going on for a while, and the fan expectations have changed. So has the buying power. When you have families spending their money on a trip to Dover, you want to give them something so they want to come back,” Bagley said.
Today’s Speedway
events, on and off-race days. | PHOTO BY TIM NWACHUKWU/GETTY IMAGES/NASCAR MEDIA
NASCAR in the state capital entered a new era after the COVID pandemic, when one of its two annual races was moved to Nashville, leaving only one race weekend.
Then after decades under local ownership, Dover Motor Sports was acquired in a $131.5 million deal with Speedway Motorsports, one of the sport’s two biggest track owners and operators.
North Carolina-based Speedway Motorsports is now in its second year of ownership of the Dover International Speedway, and its top leadership sees NASCAR remaining in the First State.
“We don’t move races that are successful. And what we’ve seen is that people make time and money available for the things that they love,” Speedway Motorsports Chief Operating Officer Mike Burch said. “We’ve been fortunate to have a strong destination venue, because it’s not just about the race anymore, it’s about what you can add on beyond that.”
Speedway Motorsports owns 11 raceways in North Carolina, California, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Las Vegas with a combined 884,000 seating capacity. Priority acquisitions are facilities that host NASCAR Cup Series, which rarely come on the market. The company now hosts 16 cup series to date.
Dover Speedway and its unique layout made it top of the list, Burch said. It also helped that it’s in the Mid-Atlantic market.
“I think Pennsylvania [ticket holders] were the fourth highest buyer for races at the [Coca-Cola 600] in Charlotte,” he said. “I like to watch fans and see what they’re wearing. In some markets we have collegiate people or travelers. But the fans at Dover are just NASCAR fans. They wear their driver’s colors proudly.”
The company is looking into more music festival opportunities. Burch said that “discussions are still ongoing” with Firefly organizer AEG Presents, which paused its annual major music festival at the racetrack property in 2023, but his company is looking into bringing more music events to Dover.
Outside marquee events, Burch believes there’s ample room for out-of-the-box events, much like the famous Dover High School 2020 graduation where students drove the mile itself. Possible options on the table could be corporate receptions or Tough Mudder events open to the public.
While the fans have become more diverse in age and demographic, they have a lot of options to spend what disposable income they have. And racetrack venues responded by refocusing on the experience. That ranges from upscaling food and beverage to making wider seats, Burch said. More additions to the fan zone include a bar and arcade, meet-and-greets, a petting zoo and even a stunt show.
“It’s almost like being on a treadmill, you’re trying to keep people coming in. If there’s a 12-year-old that doesn’t have a ticket to the race, we can at least get them here for a meet-and-greet, or even to hear the roar of the crowd,” Tatoian said. “We have to capture their hearts early. Otherwise, the conversation gets more difficult.”
Just look at Bagely. That first race that his father brought him to sparked a passion. Now he’s visited every racetrack to call turns.
“For me, it started as a love of automobile racing. But it was also a way for my father and I to bond. Even as a teenager, that was common ground for us,” Bagley said. “You’re captivated by these daredevils, and you really see the art of the craft on display.”
