During his first project as senior construction manager for Speedway Motorsports Inc., John Zudell was standing on pit road looking toward a Turn 4 seating addition at Lowe’s Motor Speedway when track president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler walked up.

“Humpy said, ‘How are you doing, John?'” Zudell recalls. “I said, ‘Humpy, I am absolutely scared to death.'”

That was back in 1995, when Zudell was directing the addition of 10,000 grandstand seats and 200 suites at the Charlotte, N.C., track. Little did he know that before long, that project would seem like small potatoes.

Zudell admits there’s still a little of that “scared to death” feeling in just about every project he oversees at an SMI track. And Bristol Motor Speedway is the one track where he’s spent perhaps the most stressful of his days during the past seven years.

“Bristol has been the biggest and the scariest,” Zudell said. “When we started there, we didn’t know what to be afraid of. … And as fast as we could build the seats, (Bristol track general manager) Jeff Byrd and his people sold them.”

Zudell and his people have been building seats since shortly after Bruton Smith bought the track in early 1996, when the half-mile track that hosts Sunday’s Food City 500 had about 67,000 seats.

Just after the first race that year, 6,000 seats were added. Before the following year’s spring race, 51,000 more seats went in. This weekend, after a complete reconstruction of the backstretch grandstands that completes “the bowl” around the concrete oval, there will be 158,500 grandstand seats and 7,000 more in the track’s luxury suites.

Zudell still remembers the scary details of the 51,000-seat addition in early 1997.

“We put in the first piece of steel in Turns 3 and 4 on Jan. 21,” he said. “We were adding 39,000 seats in that end of the track and had to have it ready to race on April 13.”

At the same time, SMI was also putting the finishing touches on its new track in Texas. It was, Zudell recalls, a crazy time.

“If we had been building a church or a library or something like that, I’m not sure we would have had it done on time,” he said. “But we knew we couldn’t just pick up the phone and call NASCAR and ask them to give us a few extra days. When guys are building racetracks they take pride in having things ready in time to put on a show.”

The changes at Bristol this weekend actually added only about 8,500 grandstand seats to the track’s capacity. About 34,000 seats, many of them concrete bleachers that were the last remaining vestiges of what was there in 1996 when SMI bought the track, were torn down. The new grandstand contains 42,500 seats, many of them flip-down chairs, and there are more bathrooms and concession stands and wider concourses for the fans lucky enough to get tickets.

Crews started cleaning the grandstands in the night hours following the Sharpie 500 in August 2002, and demolition began the next day. The early start helped Zudell and his crew get a head start that proved helpful during an unusually wet winter.

“(On) 22 out of 28 days in February, (we got) rain, snow or ice,” Zudell said, shaking his head. “Starting early has helped keep us from running around like our hair was on fire on this one.”

Zudell also shakes his head when he reviews the work done here since 1996.

“We’ve moved part of Beaver Creek, which runs along the edge of the property, to give us a little bit of land,” he said. “We’ve moved more than 3 million cubic yards of dirt and rock — mostly rock.

“We blew up a mountain behind Turn 2 and moved that rock out of there. When we were doing the blasting for that we closed down the highway running beside the track. It was a good thing we did because one piece of rock about the size of a mobile home landed in the road.”

The site for the track itself is remarkably small — the “footprint” of the track and all its grandstands sits on about 20 acres. By comparison, there are nearly 100 acres at Charlotte counting only the racetrack and the infield and excluding the stands. It’s also hilly — Zudell’s crews have filled in 36 feet behind Turn 3 and 30 more feet in Turn 4 trying to level things out some.

“Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier if we’d moved a mile down the road and started over on a flat piece of ground,” Zudell said.