With over 800,000 bulbs planted in the ground, 16,000 Crape Myrtles and 18,000 Azaleas, Barber Motorsports Park is exploding with springtime color. It’s a setting so serene and so naturally beautiful, it has earned the reputation as the “August National of Motorsports.”
This weekend’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama is the NTT IndyCar Series’ annual trip to the Deep South. It has been an instant hit since the first time IndyCar competed here on August 11, 2010.
The annual Indianapolis 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Memorial Day Weekend may be IndyCar’s version of “The Masters” but Barber Motorsports Park is certainly its Augusta National.
Sunday’s race at the 2.3-mile, 17-turn road course in Leeds, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham, has become one of the most popular, and most successful, races on the IndyCar schedule. Sunday’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama was announced as a sellout, one week ago.
With all of the land available to witness a race at the facility, how does a road course sell out?
When George Barber created this magnificent racing facility, he wanted his spectators to have a premium experience. It was more important to him to host 30,000 or 40,000 spectators per day in comfortable surroundings, than it was to jam them into the facility.
It’s quality, not quantity, that has always been important to the 82-year-old former owner of Barber Pure Milk Dai DAI-0.1%ry – a popular Alabama milk producer before it was sold to Dean Foods DF 0.0% in 1997.
In an exclusive interview with Barber on April 27, he told me how an Alabama dairy owner created the Augusta National of Motorsports.
“I don’t want to put you in a stand where you are elbow to elbow with somebody for a couple hours,” Barber explained. “That just doesn’t work. I want to sit you on a bank with a shade tree and your beer cooler and then get tired of looking at the race from that point and get on the tram and go to the next corner.
Source: forbes.com
