Ally 400 Nashville

It was great to have Cup racing back in middle Tennessee, however the promotions were consistently (and it would appear intentionally) misleading. This is not a return to this facility after 30+ years. There has NEVER been a Cup race at this facility. Massive ad campaigns contradicting this truth - That's a sad approach.

The seating in the "temporary" bleachers was comfortable enough. The seat pitch was quite wide, which was a nice surprise. What was not such a nice surprise was how poor the sight lines were. From where we sat, near the center of the first front stretch dogleg (midway between turn 4 and start/finish), the cars were completely out of sight from turn four until nearly the S/F line. I've been to a lot of Cup tracks and never seen anything like it. The design of the bleachers is terrible, Just awful. Presumably the permanent stands are better, but if they build more seats, beware. They don't seem to understand what you're there to see.

This is a return to normalcy after the pandemic, and a return to racing at this track after 10 years closed, so some growing pains are expected. That being said, the concession staffing was completely inadequate. Tremendous, slow-moving lines throughout the race. Again, worst I've ever seen at a Cup race.

Last, the parking ingress/egress was ridiculous. Granted, it's been 10 years since the last race and there are lessons to learn, but it shouldn't require trial and error to know that emptying the entire infield plus a hundred acres of field parking through a single lane to the highway is going to be non-functional. Sitting still in line for hours is not a sign of acceptable planning. Most facilities work closely with law enforcement to optimize flow in and out, and use counter-flow lanes, multiple entrances, and traffic direction on speedway property, to name a few. None of that was in place here. If NSS intends to grow this event beyond the modest 38,000 crowd (by Cup standards) they had this year, they had better take a very close look at traffic and parking. If there had been 60,000, we would have had to spend the night.

The track was great. The dominant car kinda stunk up the show, but there was good racing. The action on the track was professional caliber. Unfortunately the promoter and operator fell quite short. I'll not return before hearing about significant changes, and even then, I'll probably attend a lower circuit race to verify before I buy another Cup ticket here.