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MONSTER ENERGY NASCAR CUP SERIES: BANK OF AMERICA ROVAL 400

September 30, 2018

Marcus Smith

Concord, North Carolina

THE MODERATOR: Marcus, this has been a lot of fun today. Why don't you give us your impressions and reactions after a great race.
MARCUS SMITH: Wow, sitting here makes me feel like I just won the race, and it was really an amazing day, a three‑year journey to get here, and everything just kind of culminated today and throughout this week. I think everything that we saw on track, the competition was really phenomenal. The track was very raceable, and we saw cars go two wide, three wide on a couple of occasions where there's a lot of concern about the width of the track and being able to race without a lot of red flags.
I think this was another one of those amazing, memorable moments for‑‑ certainly for me and I think for NASCAR, when you think about great moments, the first time we ever turned on lights here at Charlotte Motor Speedway, One Hot Night for the All‑Star, and then today the inaugural Bank of America Roval 400, I think for me, it really lived up to the hype.

Q. Marcus, you said it lived up to the hype; is this the kind of thing you pictured at the start of the day, or is this one of those finishes that you could have only dreamed to have had happen?
MARCUS SMITH: You know, I wanted there to be an opportunity to pass for the lead, for the win on that last lap. What happened is not what I had imagined or necessarily hoped for. I think it was incredibly exciting. The roar from the fans was all I needed to know that that was the moment that everybody will remember for a long time.
I think it was certainly more than I had expected and hoped for in terms of the excitement for our fans.

Q. You mentioned One Hot Night; where do you think this finish today is going to rank as far as NASCAR lore years down the road?
MARCUS SMITH: One Hot Night was in, what, '92? We're in 2018. I mean, it's been a long time since One Hot Night. This is new highlight footage for NASCAR. I think this was way more exciting probably than any football game on right now, which is pretty cool.

Q. When you and NASCAR go back and re‑watch the race and look at all the numbers and everything there is to look at, what are going to be the things that you look at to determine if this race was a, quote‑unquote, success?
MARCUS SMITH: Numbers? I don't know. That's a great question. My metric is highlight‑worthy moments. That's the metric that I use, and I think we were full of them today. Every time I saw camera people, photographers this entire week, they had been grinning ear to ear because they have so much to capture. That's a huge win for all of us.

Q. Marcus, after a race like this and as people have talked about the road courses becoming more like the short tracks where the excitement or people look forward to those events, as a leader of your company, does this lead to the issue of starting to think about Rovalizing other ovals, or does everybody just need to pump the brakes and just let it be an infrequent thing that people enjoy, because you talk about One Hot Night, everybody went to lights after that and it lost its luster. Where does the sport need to go in looking at Rovalizing tracks from this point on?
MARCUS SMITH: That's a great question. I love how you're channeling your inner Larry Mac with the pump the brakes. I do think that we can learn from our history and see that there was a time when nobody really cared for short tracks or at least the majority of fans and NASCAR really didn't care for short tracks. Now we love short tracks. There was a time when Charlotte was the best, the most amazing track design ever, and then a lot of people followed suit.
I think that learn from that past and see what might help us going forward, so certainly I'm not looking at any of our properties to add a road course into, to Rovalizing, as you said. I feel like this is unique to Charlotte, and we've got other speedways out there that produce their own unique action. Plus on top of that, I'm really excited about all the things I'm hearing about next year's racing with the new aero and power package. I think it's going to be fantastic for the whole sport.

Q. (Inaudible.)
MARCUS SMITH: Good questions. Yeah, I've had a few people talk about night racing on the Roval, and that‑‑ who knows. There are‑‑ I think‑‑ I know there's at least one night race. F1 has their night race. I think that that's a possibility. Right now I think we're going to take some time to kind of bring all the ideas together. Everybody has got lots of ideas. We take notes as a group, as a company. We have sort of this repository of ideas that we email to a particular email address in the team, and it's just chock full of ideas. So we'll take all those things, pull them together, and think about what we can do to make things better. We're always sort of in a constant state of improvement and passion to make things fantastic and exceed expectations.
We'll look at those things and see what happens next.

Q. Say you don't get the crazy moments there at the end, so it's a bit of a hypothetical, but do you still consider what you saw prior to that a good race, and if that's the norm going forward, is that still a good race?
MARCUS SMITH: Yeah, you know, I never get to see our own races all that much, so I'm busy talking to people and walking around and checking on things, so I can't wait to watch this back on TV. But for all the time that I did get to see it, there was great competitive racing, and I think that's very unusual for a road course. You don't have that kind of close, within‑a‑car‑length‑or‑two kind of action.
You could always see that there were opportunities and moments and strategies that were playing out, and I felt like you could feel that from lap one, and that I felt like was a good thing. I saw a lot of positive social media as I was walking from place to place. I had several text messages from people that were here or watching it on TV that gave me some good feedback, so I think that's a good thing.

Q. I want to just expand beyond just the Roval, but this year for Charlotte Motor Speedway, the 600, restrictor plates with the All‑Star and then of course here, did that just culminate this year from the standpoint of the planning that went to 2018 being such a marquee year for Charlotte?
MARCUS SMITH: You know, in hindsight, it's pretty fantastic, and I appreciate you asking the question. I'm really proud of our here team at Charlotte. I'm proud of the racing that we've had. I think that it was‑‑ these things all did come together this year, but it wasn't necessarily planned to happen that way. But I think it's worked out really well.
Going forward, Charlotte Motor Speedway is a track where fans can see some of the most unique and special racing in the world with NASCAR's All‑Star Race, the 600, and now the Roval 400, and I think that we are doing some good things in the whole sport, and I'm really proud that Charlotte Motor Speedway can be a big part of that.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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