Alabama has to protect the two NASCAR race weekends at Talladega Superspeedway from potential schedule changes in future years, according to State Sen. Lance Bell (R-Pell City).
Talladega is currently in the midst of its second NASCAR race weekend of 2025. Two races for Talladega have already been confirmed for 2026.
Bell told 1819 News in a recent interview that it would be a “massive hit” if Talladega were to ever lose one of the two annual race weekends on the NASCAR schedule.
“It’s crazy the millions of dollars of economic impact that it has for the General Fund budget and the Education Trust Fund. When you talk about the hotels, the food, the grocery stores, and just the miscellaneous stuff that’s bought outside of the track. When you go to Wal-Mart on Tuesday and Wednesday and see the motor homes lined up going in there stocking up their motor homes or the vans, the cars and they’re in there stocking up on the groceries, the beer, the soft drinks. We’re getting all that tax revenue here and it’s a crazy amount of money that comes in off that,” Bell said. “It’s very important. It would be a massive hit on our education budget and our general fund budget. We don’t want to lose a race. You saw Chicago throwing a lot of money at NASCAR to get the street race up there and they got it up there. Well, that race up in Chicago had to come from some other track. That’s the one thing we’ve got to protect here in Alabama is making sure we maintain both races for the economic impact that it provides our state.”
Both Talladega races rank second and third in NASCAR attendance after the Daytona 500, according to Bell.
“I feel like because of the support they have here in Alabama we’ll sell tickets to all 50 states and anywhere between 23 and 27 countries for just about every race,” Bell said. “To have that kind of impact and that number of different people come into the state is what we have which is phenomenal. We’ve always got to protect those two races. We can’t just sit down and take them for granted either.”
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