Those of you that have been purchasing ticket packages at Kentucky Speedway, in the hopes that this would gain you first dibs on Winston/Nextel/Sprint Cup tickets when they were able to secure a race, sorry about your luck.  U.S. District Court Judge William Bertelsman issued an opinion yesterday, dismissing the Speedway's lawsuit alleging unfair business practices against NASCAR and ISC (International Speed Corporation). 

The decision basically kills any hope of Kentucky Speedway gaining a Sprint Cup race, short of track owner Jerry Carroll purchasing another track and then moving its race to Sparta.  Judge Bertelsman's decision was a summary judgment, which basically means that he did not even believe that the Speedway had even a legal leg to stand on to bring suit against NASCAR.

No one should really be surprised by this.  NASCAR has been very effective at taking control of its own operations, using ISC to purchase many of the tracks that it runs races at and building new tracks under that umbrella.  The relationship between the two is borderline incestuous - I'd love to see org charts of the two organizations to see how many lines cross corporations - but as the legal opinion reads, "...a producer of a product is free...to select its distributors and and to refuse to deal with would-be distributors..."  So the relationship is pretty much legalized, and there's not much getting around this now.

Here's where it's going to get very interesting.  NASCAR doesn't deal very well with dissenters.  They won't strip any races from Kentucky Speedway - that'd be extremely bad P.R.  But there's other ways they could exact their pound of flesh.  For instance, this year's Nationwide Cup Series (formerly Busch Series) race at the speedway is scheduled the day before the Sprint Cup race in Brooklyn, Michigan.  This way, some of the Sprint Cup drivers can race here and then get easily up to Michigan, thus helping Kentucky Speedway's attendance.  Don't be surprised if, in 2009, Kentucky's race might be the day before the Sprint Cup race in Infineon, California.  If you don't think NASCAR's spiteful enough to pull something like that, you just haven't been watching the series long enough then.