Get Bent, Jerry Jones: Charlotte NASCAR Track To Build World’s Largest HD Video Board

Jerry Jones isn’t going to like this.

Tour guides in Cowboys Stadium will soon have to refer to their mammoth HD screen as only the world’s second-largest video board after Charlotte Motor Speedway completes its plan to build an even bigger screen next year.

In a news conference Tuesday at the track, Charlotte unveiled the design for its 200-foot-long, 80-foot-tall mega screen that will sit just off the backstretch.

“Jerry’s a nice guy, but he has limited space there,” said Bruton Smith, the innovative, free-spending Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman. “He can only do something a certain size. But we’re not interested in that – we wanted to do something very big here.”

Is this the rich dude version of giving the finger?

Smith took a couple more veiled shots at Jones and the Cowboys’ $40 million screen, saying he hoped his son Marcus (the track’s president) didn’t spend that much.

When the track showed a graphic comparing the size of various objects to the screen (it will be larger than the White House, for example), Smith quipped that it was “bigger than Texas.”

While that’s not quite true, a Panasonic official said he expects the board to be certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as 40 percent larger than the Cowboys’ video board.

It will take up 16,000 square feet and contain more than nine million LED bulbs, offering 720p HD quality.

“This is not Texas-sized, this is Charlotte Motor Speedway-sized,” Smith said. “It’s a giant step for NASCAR and what we do.”

The board will be positioned only six feet from the track, which hopefully is far enough back to not get hit by any debris or – God forbid – a car going 200 mph. That would be much worse than a punt hitting the Cowboys’ video screen.

Unfortunately for fans sitting in the Turn 2 section of the track, the board won’t be visible. But Smith said the track will try to provide some sort of smaller viewing option for those who can’t see the giant screen when it debuts in May.

“Maybe something Texas-sized,” he said as reporters laughed.

Below: Photo taken by SB Nation’s Jeff Gluck shows a rendering of what the video board will look like on the backstretch. At the right, you can see the grandstands; the yellow stripe is the track wall.