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For the first time in years, sport’s biggest race struggles to fill every seat

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Reggie Jenkins stands on a corner across from the entrance outside turn four at Daytona International Speedway with a homemade sign that reads “Buy/Sell Tickets.”

The 47-year-old scalper has been working this spot in early February for almost a decade. It’s usually prime real estate as thousands of fans make their way from the adjacent parking lots into the home of the Daytona 500.  This year, though, things are different. Here it is Friday afternoon, barely 48 hours before the green flag drops in NASCAR’s Super Bowl, and business is decidedly slow.

“Usually, Friday things pick up a little,” said Jenkins, who lives in nearby Deland. “People are looking to upgrade their 500 tickets or try and pick up a couple of tickets to Saturday’s (Nationwide Series) race.”

Instead, all Jenkins appears to be working on is a sunburn.

A car stops to ask him what he’s got and when he says he’ll take $100 for grandstand tickets with a face value of $135, the car quickly pulls away.  “It’s hard to sell ’em when you know there’s so many out there,” he said.

For the first time in years, NASCAR’s biggest race is struggling to fill every seat in Daytona’s massive grandstands, part of the fallout from the nation’s economic collapse.

While NASCAR officials still expect a sellout, they had to cut select ticket prices just days before the race to get there.

“This is a fixture in American culture — this sport,” NASCAR chairman Brian France said last month. “We have seen tough times before. We’re actually optimistic about ’09 for a lot of reasons.”

So is Richard Beverly. The 38-year-old Beverly started coming to the 500 with his father 20 years ago. He’s only missed a handful of races since, and didn’t opt to change plans even as the economy crumbled. He watched Nationwide Series qualifying on Friday afternoon from a deck tucked against the lake in Daytona’s infield.

Beverly bought his tickets for Speedweeks almost a year ago and decided to cut short his vacation last summer to save up a little scratch for sunny Florida in early February.

“How does it get better than this?” said Beverly, who lives in Atlanta. “If this was the only vacation I knew I was going to get all year, I’d still do it.”

Just at a lesser price. Beverly is hardly alone. Things have been decidedly sleepy around Daytona this week, as fans seem to have saved up for the weekend rather than take an entire week off work to ease a case of Spring Fever.

While signs outside nearly every hotel and restaurant along A1A a few miles east of the track read “Welcome race fans,” they almost all have a neon “vacancy” light right next them — something unheard of a few years ago.

“We didn’t decide until last month to come down,” said Jason Martin, 26 from Fayetteville, N.C. “I thought we’d have to get a room in Orlando or something but we found something in Ormond Beach and it wasn’t like a million dollars.”

Martin’s hotel didn’t even require a minimum stay, usually common practice whenever NASCAR is in town.

The bargains aren’t limited to the hotels. NASCAR cut the prices of some of its most popular concession items. You can pick up an all-beef hot dog for $3 or grab four “Fast Franks” dogs for $10.

Beer, liquor and other track staples are still upward of $5, but there’s a simple solution if that’s too expensive: bring your own cooler.

“What other sport allows you to do that?” said Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage, who joined other track operators at Daytona this week to do publicity for the upcoming 36-week season.

Gossage pointed out that fans who decide to camp at his track for either of its two races can stay for as little as $75 for the entire week, cheaper than one night in most hotels.

Every track, it seems, has a plan:

• Officials at Atlanta Motor Speedway are offering $95 tickets for its March 8 Sprint Cup race for the face value of whatever car number wins the 500. A similar plan a year ago was limited to the first 1,000 tickets sold. This year’s plan will be for any fan who wants to pick up tickets so long as they do it by Tuesday afternoon. Maybe fans should be rooting for the No. 00 Toyota driven by David Reutimann or the No. 1 Chevy of pole-sitter Martin Truex Jr.
• Denny Hamlin’s team is giving away 12 free tickets to the race at Sonoma in June, and Hamlin is giving away at least four tickets to every Sprint Cup race this season to fans who apply through his Web site.
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway dropped select tickets along the backstretch for July’s 400-mile Sprint Cup race to $45. The move is an apology of sorts for last year’s public-relations disaster when tire problems turned the race into a series of 10-lap shootouts.

The hope is if tickets are reasonable, fans will still come and bring enough cash to spread a little around. Maybe, but it’s not quite business as usual in 2009.

Inside a souvenir store on the infield near pit road you can buy a $3 black marker or a $299 leather jacket. Russell Rabin and his 7-year-old son Jason decided on a pair of Dale Earnhardt Jr. hats at $25 a pop. When they got to the register, Jason grabbed one of the pens near the register and tried to hand it to the cashier.

“Sorry buddy, don’t think we’ll get one,” Rabin said, putting the pen back in the bin.

SAN DIEGO – Isidro Diaz surfs channels on his old TV about three hours a night in the trailer he rents for $350 a month. Come Tuesday, his limited choice of programs will be much more limited.

Although the government delayed the mandatory shutdown of analog TV signals by four months to give people with older TVs more time to prepare, that’s small comfort to Diaz and other people who live in cities where some broadcasters are switching to all-digital broadcasts Tuesday, as they had originally planned.

Because it is costly to keep broadcasting analog signals, nearly 500 stations said they would make the transition Tuesday rather than June 12. The Federal Communications Commission told 123 stations they might have to reconsider, so no city loses all its analog network broadcasts, and many stations have agreed. But still there will be an odd patchwork of programming for millions of Americans who rely on analog TV signals.

To deal with the change, they need a digital converter box or a new TV with a digital tuner, or cable or satellite service.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of 200 advocacy groups, has digital TV assistance centers in seven metropolitan areas — Atlanta, Detroit, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Ore., and St. Paul, Minn. — to answer questions, demonstrate converter boxes and sometimes send out house calls.

In San Diego, the nation’s eighth-largest city, the ABC, CBS, Fox and CW affiliates plan to end analog broadcasts Tuesday.

Diaz, a 63-year-old Mexican immigrant who was laid off a month ago by a garden nursery that paid $10 an hour, figures he will eventually muster $200 for a digital television; the least expensive model on Best Buy Co.’s Web site costs $130.

He recently shopped at an electronics store for a digital converter box for the $40 used Sony TV he bought from a newspaper classified ad four years ago. But the $60 converter box didn’t seem worth it because he can get a new TV for a little more.

Subscribing to cable or satellite TV is out of the question.

“There’s no work right now, $40 a month is very difficult,” Diaz said while scarfing a dinner of beef tacos at a stand in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood.

The Obama administration sought the delay in the analog TV shutdown after the government ran out of money for the $40 coupons that subsidize digital converter boxes. The program has a waiting list of 4 million coupons; each household can get up to two.

According to research firm MRI, 17.7 percent of Americans live in households with only over-the-air TV. The Nielsen Co. said last week that more than 5.8 million U.S. households, or 5.1 percent of all homes, were not ready for the analog shutdown.

However, officials at stations that plan to make the switch Tuesday believe that the transition will mainly go smoothly, and that the delay will confuse consumers.

“They’ve had two years to get ready is our feeling,” said Larry Patton, general manager of KSWO-TV, an ABC affiliate in Lawton, Okla. “We feel there’s always going to be a few people who are going to wake up on the morning of Feb. 17, or June 17, or whenever it is, and not be ready.”

Bryan Frye, marketing director at KAKE-TV, the ABC station in Wichita, Kan., said he was half-joking when he described fears about the analog shutdown as “a little like Y2K.”

“We are going to pull out all the stops, we are going to have everybody on board, you know, full alert,” Frye said. “It is going to happen and everybody is going to go, `Hmmm, OK.’”

In Jackson, Miss., Ashley Lewis, 25, said she has visited an older neighbor several times to help with her digital converter box. Lewis bought a new antenna Thursday for the neighbor, thinking that might make the box work better. In most cases digital signals, which are more efficient, come in better than analog, but some older antennas aren’t well suited.

“She can barely walk,” Lewis said. “Her knees are so bad sometimes and she is on a fixed income, and I don’t think it is fair for elderly people.”

A Radio Shack store in Casper, Wyo., where the ABC and CBS stations switch next week, has found that the converter boxes confuse some consumers, said assistant store manager Dorothy Durda.

“Normally, they come in and we draw them a little diagram or whatever of how to do it and that seems to fix their problem for them,” Durda said.

Major San Diego stations have twice flashed warnings to TV screens on analog signals, telling anyone who sees the message to call a toll-free number for more information, said Jeff Block, manager of KGTV-TV, an ABC affiliate.

After a warning in December, the toll-free number got 359 calls. A warning in January yielded 510 calls.

Diaz didn’t call the number but said Tuesday’s switch comes as no surprise. The stations he watches have advertised the change for about three months.

He’ll still be able to get Spanish-language news broadcasts, which he watches about three hours each weeknight. And he can still enjoy boxing on Saturday nights and soccer matches on weekends. But starting Tuesday he’ll have a puny selection of English-language programs.  Diaz said he might browse again for TVs this weekend but isn’t sure when he’ll buy one.

“I can wait a little longer,” he said.

Congress gave stations the option to stick with the original transition date

NEW YORK – Television viewers who use antennas and were expecting a few more months to prepare for digital TV may not have much time left before their sets go dark: Many stations still plan to drop analog broadcasts in less than two weeks.

When Congress postponed the mandatory transition to digital TV until June, it also gave stations the option to stick to the originally scheduled date of Feb. 17.

Lawmakers wanted to address concerns that many households that receive TV signals through an antenna are not prepared for the switch. They were also mindful that a government fund has run out of money to subsidize digital converter boxes for older TVs.

Dozens of stations around the country now say they are going to take advantage of the option to drop analog broadcasts this month.

Many others are on the fence. The total number is likely to be in the hundreds, a substantial chunk and maybe even a majority of the country’s 1,796 full-power TV stations.

The House voted Wednesday to delay the mandatory shutdown until June 12. The Senate passed the measure unanimously last week, and the bill now heads to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The legislation means analog signals could vanish entirely in some areas but persist in neighboring regions. In rural areas, low-power stations will continue to broadcast in analog even beyond June 12.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission ordered stations that still plan to turn off analog signals on Feb. 17 to notify the FCC by Monday.

Acting Chairman Michael Copps said the commission could prohibit stations from making the switch if doing so is not in the public interest. For instance, if all stations in a market want to turn off early, that would draw FCC scrutiny, he said at a commission meeting.

For many broadcasters, delaying the shutdown is inconvenient and expensive. Many of them have scheduled engineering work on their equipment to make the transition on Feb. 17.

The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, the public broadcasting network in the state, said Thursday that it planned to cease analog transmission from its full-power antennas at 1 p.m. on Feb. 17.

“We have four full-power stations all with 30-year-old-plus analog transmitters that are costly to maintain, putting out less than a quality signal,” said Mark Norman, deputy director of technology at OETA.

“Sitting right alongside them are brand-new digital transmitters that have been running now for a few years. We just think it’s counterproductive to continue to put money into the old ones.”

Keeping the analog equipment in operation until June would cost the station about $200,000 at a time when the state is considering cutting its contribution to the budget, Norman said.

PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan said about half of the 356 public broadcasting stations across the country will make the switch on Feb. 17. Many will do it for financial reasons. PBS said last month that if all its stations had to delay the switch, it would cost an estimated $22 million.

The Utah Broadcasters Association said the commercial stations in the state still plan to shut down analog on Feb. 17, while the public ones will wait until June.

In Wisconsin, at least two stations in Madison and five in the La Cross-Eau Claire plan to flip the switch on Feb. 17. In Minnesota, at least four stations plan to keep that date, along with five in Iowa.

Copps, the acting FCC chairman, said CBS, Fox, ABC and NBC and Telemundo had committed to keeping the stations they own broadcasting analog until June 12.

Together, they own 85 full-power stations, mainly in large cities. The rest of the stations that carry these networks are affiliates not owned by the network. ABC spokeswoman Julie Hoover said some of its stations may still go early if all other stations in their market do so.

Gannett Co. and Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. also pledged to maintain the vast majority of their stations on analog, Copps said. They own or operate 52 stations.

“These broadcasters deserve our gratitude. I encourage other broadcasters to join them,” Copps said.

The transition to digital TV is being mandated because digital signals are more efficient than analog ones. Ending analog broadcasts will free up valuable space in the nation’s airwaves for commercial wireless services and emergency-response networks. In a few areas, including Hawaii, stations have already abandoned analog broadcasting.

TVs connected to cable or satellite services are not affected by the analog shutdown. But that still leaves a lot of people who could see channels go dark on Feb. 17. According to research firm MRI, 17.7 percent of Americans live in households with only over-the-air TV.

Most of them are ready for the analog shutdown, according to the National Association of Broadcasters and analysts at the Nielsen Co. Nielsen said Thursday that more than 5.8 million U.S. households, or 5.1 percent of all homes, are not ready.

That means the shutdown of analog signals, which broadcasters had hoped would happen at nearly the same time nationwide, could now unfold in a confusing patchwork of different schedules.

At the Oklahoma public broadcasting association, Norman believes viewers are ready for the switch. The network has invited viewers to call in with transition questions on several nights. Each time, the number of callers has been smaller, Norman said.

“We really don’t think it’s going be as major of an issue as people anticipated,” he said.