The owners of the Sonoma Raceway (the NASCAR venue up north formerly known as Sears Point and Infineon) have submitted a proposal to play host to a massive music festival on the scale of Coachella and Outside Lands, which could happen as soon as 2017. An outfit known as Nitro Fidelity Entertainment out of Napa came to the raceway with their business plan a year ago, as the Marin Independent Journal reports, and last week the raceway owners made their first approach to the Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission. This is the first step before heading to get official planning approvals from the county.

The Commission has no approval authority, and speakers in favor of the festival just barely outnumbered those opposed at the meeting. But local business owners are obviously keen on the idea of bringing as many as 55,000 attendees per day to the 1,600-acre facility, which is already configured to handle big crowds and traffic after four decades as a race track.

Also unlike Outside Lands, or Napa's smaller BottleRock festival which is now heading into its third year, the Sonoma County Raceway is rurally located with few close neighbors, allowing for 6,000 people to camp onsite and reducing the noise impacts that the other more urban festivals make. The plan would be to have music acts from noon to midnight with a dance tent that goes until 4 a.m.

As raceway general manager and president Steve Page says, "We have been approached on countless occasions by promoters who wanted to bring music to the facility. We never took any of those seriously. This was the first time the business proposition and the philosophy were appealing to us." He also says this approvals process will be lengthy and expensive, but they'd hope to be able to host the first festival in spring or fall of 2017.

Also included in the approvals process will be a change in the raceway's use permit, which currently states it is limited to "racing and race related purposes."

The same promoters, Nitro Fidelity Entertainment, are looking to produce music festivals at four other raceway locations owned by the same parent company, North Carolina-based Speedway Motorsports, the first of which is already on the calendar for this coming August at the Kentucky Speedway.

Previously: 140 Gate Crashers, 1000 Pounds Of Cheese: Outside Lands By The Numbers