NASCAR has named Ticketmaster as its official ticketing partner starting in 2025 — and fans aren’t happy about the prospect of paying extra fees for their race tickets.
Ticketmaster has long been a partner of Speedway Motorsports, an organization that owns several of the NASCAR tracks on the calendar. Now, all tracks will sell tickets via the platform.
NASCAR partners with Ticketmaster — to the frustration of fans
A press release in late September declared, “NASCAR has named Ticketmaster its official ticketing partner in a move that complements Ticketmaster’s longtime partnership with Speedway Motorsports and further unifies ticketing for fans of the sport.”
Speedway Motorsports is a company founded by Bruton Smith that took ownership of race tracks around America that host NASCAR, NHRA, and World of Outlaws events. Notable venues include Charlotte Motor Speedway, Bristol Motor Speedway, Sonoma Raceway, and many more.
NASCAR itself owns a handful of tracks, including Darlington and Daytona, while other tracks like Circuit of The Americas, Pocono, ad Milwaukee are privately owned.
In the past, fans looking to purchase tickets for a Speedway Motorsports-owned event would shop through Ticketmaster, while other tracks used Tickets.com and SeatGeek.
Now, fans looking to purchase NASCAR tickets can find everything in the same place: Ticketmaster.
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While the streamlining of the ticket purchasing experience is a boon to fans, Ticketmaster itself is a hugely problematic platform that has worked hard to earn a negative reputation thanks to its purchasing fees, technical issues, bugs, bots and more.
While Ticketmaster has been widely understood to be problematic for years, it hit new heights in 2022 as legions of Taylor Swift fans waited in long online queues to purchase a coveted ticket only to lose their spot in line at the last second due to technical glitches. Making matters worse, by the time they were able to try again, bots had scooped up countless tickets and had begun re-selling them at hugely inflated fees.
While it’s unlikely that any NASCAR race will command the same level of hype as the Eras tour, fans are still frustrated. Some reacted to the announcement by cracking jokes like, “Ticketmaster sent me a fee for reading this” and “Would you like some fees with your fees? Okay, that’s going to be an additional fee.”
Other fans responded with screenshots of their Ticketmaster-purchased NASCAR seats. A fan named Blake shared that he was charged $123 in fees for a $560 four-ticket purchase. Another fan put together a spreadsheet showing that purchasing fees were higher on Ticketmaster than on previous purchasing platforms.
NASCAR has been growing at an impressive rate, increasing viewership and expanding into new markets, which is part of what made the Ticketmaster partnership so perplexing to fans. Frustrations with the ticketing platform have run deep for years, and NASCAR’s commitment to such a fan-unfriendly platform has raised concerns about the ultimate goals of the sport.
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