CONCORD, N.C. – The move to let a limited number of fans back in the grandstands at two upcoming NASCAR events is monumental in many ways.

By opening the doors at Homestead-Miami Speedway to 1,000 South Florida service members and honorary guests for the Dixie Vodka 400 on Sunday, NASCAR will be the first major sport in the United States to host an event with fans in attendance since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all sports in the country in mid-March.

“I think everyone on this call, and certainly the people around the sport, recognize what race fans mean to our sport,” said NASCAR Executive Vice President, Chief Operations and Sales Officer Daryl Wolfe. “I’ve always said I think we have the best fans in all sports. They’re knowledgeable, passionate, loyal. They’re the reason we show up and race every week. They’re the energy that fuels the sport week in, week out, month by month, for the entire year.

“Plain and simple, today’s announcement is we want race fans back at our race tracks,” Wolfe continued. “Based on all of our interactions we’ve done so far, consumer research, independent conversations with ticket holders, overwhelmingly our race fans want to come back to the race tracks.

“Having said that we also clearly understand that there is an immense responsibility here that comes with this exercise. We want to be very methodical, very measured, and we want to be cautious as we go through this.”

NASCAR Vice President Racing Operation John Bobo explained that the policies that will be in place for Homstead, as well as Talladega Superspeedway on June 21, where 5,000 fans will be allowed to attend, have been developed following NASCAR’s rollout of its Return to Racing initiative that started at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway on May 17.

“We are looking at what we did on the event side. When we went into Darlington, we had a plan that medical experts had helped us devise that we thought was thoughtful and addressed the responsibility that it takes to put on an event,” Bobo said. “We’ve had a lot of racing opportunities since then. We’ve gotten to learn from what we’ve done and take the best of that and then put that into protocols for these limited experiences of bringing small numbers of guests back.

“Like on the events side, we’re going to have a pretty robust screening of guests when they arrive at track,” Bobo said. “We’re going to have a lot of social distancing. One of the advantages of NASCAR as a sport is many of our venues are massive. It just gives us the opportunity to really socially distance a lot of people.”

“We’re going to have a lot of hand sanitizing, hand washing,” Bobo continued. “One of the things that I’m kind of proud of to see is we’re going to have a clean team, a clean team that’s at track constantly cleaning everything very visibly for every guest that’s there to know we’re doing everything we can to keep them safe.

“We feel confident in the plan. We look forward to taking the things that we’ve learned in racing up to date and apply those to these small groups of fans that are returning to see how we can learn to operate in this environment, like everybody is trying to do.”

At this time NASCAR has announced any fan policies outside of the events at Homestead and Talladega, but the eventual goal will be to bring fans back to races across the United States.

“When we go from Homestead to Talladega, I’m sure there’s going to be a question about where do you go from here, just like when we announced the schedule, really we want to focus today’s call on these two properties because that’s what we want to address,” Wolfe said. “You start going out in the schedule, Pocono is next. Publicly we said we’re not going to have fans in Pocono, in Pennsylvania. It is so dependent on the local communities, advice from medical experts, working directly with governor’s offices. Candidly, frankly, in some states there is more flexibility than in other states.

“Having said that, we can probably be more aggressive with some of these numbers, but we’re choosing not to. We want to start very small, learn and then adapt those, like John mentioned, protocols based on the learnings to the next event.”