Larry Woody, in an article published on the Nashville City Paper’s web site, says the Fairgrounds track is on life support, and the plug may about to be pulled.

Woody lays the blame on several entities: City Hall (via the Fair Board), the economy, and race fans. I’d add one more group to that list: NASCAR.

Every time NASCAR has a Cup race on Saturday night, it keeps local fans away from the local tracks. NASCAR has been eating its own young for years this way. You can’t really blame a race fan for staying at home and watching a race for free instead of going to a track and spending $20 to get in plus about that much in food. And now with everyone deciding to have a recession, no one is spending money for anything, so that’s going to make the track’s survival that much harder.

I said a few weeks ago that I didn’t think there’d be any weekly racing in 2009. I still think that’s going to be the case. I took a lot of heat over it on one of the local racing forums, but other than some wishful thinking, I didn’t really see anything that would make me change my mind.

I think the best case scenario is that we end up with a year like 1979, where there wasn’t any weekly racing. But they did have about one major race weekend a month. Weekly racing resumed the next year, but by then folks had found other things to do on Saturday nights.

The Fair Board meets tomorrow, and what comes out of that meeting will have a big impact on what happens at the Fairgrounds in 2009. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the meeting (one almost gets the impression that they have them on Tuesday at 8:00 am in order to make it difficult for the general public to attend the meetings).