The long-awaited and much-discussed music festival scheduled for this summer at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon has been postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“COVID-19 has made everything very complicated to pull off that event for this summer, and I completely understand that,” said David McGrath, the Executive Vice President and General Manager at NHMS. “But I want everybody to understand that we’re still deeply committed to having the event and we’ll start re-tooling for 2021.”
The speedway has been looking for new ways to attract crowds and draw visitors to the property through smaller races, a new dirt track and other special events since it lost one of two annual NASCAR Cup Series races. The concert was tentatively planned for mid-August. As of now, the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301, the only Cup series race currently held at the speedway, is still scheduled for July 19. Unlike a concert, the race could happen without fans, or with crowd control restrictions.
“We’re disappointed, but we certainly understand the current situation and really safety is paramount to our company,” McGrath said of the music festival. “We want to make sure our fans, country music fans, our partners and our teammates all stay safe, so we want to make sure we do the right thing.”
NHMS has been trying to hold a music festival on its property for years. Plans were originally delayed by a 2018 lawsuit filed by a group of neighbors who cited a 1989 settlement that stated the speedway “shall not permit musical concerts of any type or description to be held on the premises currently known as New Hampshire International Speedway.” Since the speedway purchased new property in 1995, which is where it intends to hold the concert, a Merrimack Superior Court judge ruled that it could hold a music festival on that part of its grounds. That May 2018 decision was appealed by the group of neighbors, but in February 2019 the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the Superior Court’s decision, paving the way for concerts in Loudon.
With the courts on its side, the speedway had been working with concert promoter Live Nation to bring a three-day country music festival to the property this summer. However, as the coronavirus pandemic worsened and large gatherings across the globe were being postponed, those plans unraveled.
“We were probably in the seventh inning in terms of putting a deal together, but we just stopped when it became clear that it just wasn’t going to happen this summer,” McGrath said. “So, we just refocus now and we are as committed as we have been for a number of years now to get this event off the ground, but it became a foregone conclusion that live music festivals in the next couple of weeks or months just wasn’t going to work out.”
There’s still plenty of work to do to organize a 2021 music festival at the speedway, but much of the planning that went into the 2020 plans can still be saved.
“There’s a lot of stuff we’ll use moving forward and our relationship with Live Nation is as strong as ever and we’ll certainly work with those folks,” McGrath said. “We’ve got a lot of legwork already done and when we feel comfortable announcing those plans and that direction, we’ll certainly do that.”
The music festival would have helped fill the void left after NHMS lost one of its two Cup series races in 2017. That race was usually held in early September, so a mid-August music festival would have occupied a similar place on the calendar.
“The good news is as we get into September and October we’ll be ramping up and figuring out what does 2021 look like and where does it fit into our calendar,” McGrath said. “Our company, Speedway Motorsports, and our CEO, Marcus Smith, is very dedicated to music fans in the New England area and to creating unique opportunities and we want to use our property in ways that we feel it’s meant to be used. But I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that, unfortunately, with COVID-19 this is just not the year to do those kinds of festivals here in New Hampshire.”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20)