The projection comes from the president of the Lake Lanier Convention & Visitors Bureau, Stacey Dickson, who says ticket sales are running ahead of projections and hotel/motel rooms are scarce.
Dickson says room availability is now "outside Gainesville and Hall County, on down past the Mall of Georgia" with hotels and motels as far south as Buckhead booking rooms for people in Georgia for the endurance race.
Dickson says she knows of one hotel which has rented all of its rooms to just two of the teams that will be competing at the Chestnut Mountain circuit.
Four days of official activity surrounding the event got underway Wednesday. The race begins at 11:15 Saturday morning.
Dickson says over the course of the four days, more than 100,000 people are expected... most of them on Saturday, but, she adds, many starting arriving earlier in the week.
She says the Petit LeMans is one of those events that "sells itself year after year" because it is so popular and such a well-established series, and the benefits from the worldwide publicity it generates for the area through the print and broadcast media can't be measured.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2010/9/232633