Turning a racetrack into a baseball field worthy of hosting Major League Baseball takes time and a plan.

Demolition at Bristol Motor Speedway started in early June. Heavy construction is now in high gear to prepare transform the facility to host the Aug. 2 Speedway Classic between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds in the first MLB game in the state of Tennessee.

For now, Bristol no longer is a racetrack.

“It’s not going to be good to have a 2-foot wall … in the outfield for a player to run into, so naturally those had to go,” said Steve Swift, senior vice president of operations development for Speedway Motorsports.

Approximately 17,500 tons of gravel are needed to level the infield. Truck drivers late last week started bringing in 340 tons of Pennsylvania clay for the playing surface, said Murray Cook, president of BrightView Sports Turf Division.

The 124,000-square-foot synthetic grass field will feature the same surface used by the Blue Jays in Toronto. There will be fencing, padding and foul poles. Musco Sports Lighting is adding 215 lights to the top of the track so no ball should be lost in a shadow.

“The field obviously is a big part of this event, and we’re making it as major league level as it needs to be for this game,” Cook said.

Hosting an MLB game requires much more than a field. BaAM Productions is helping MLB and Bristol officials ensure that the teams have locker rooms complete with showers, strength and conditioning rooms, coach and trainers’ offices, batting cages and even a full weight room.

“Everything that we’re going to do is temporary in nature, and it’s been precisely planned layers and layers,” BaAM President Annemarie Roe said last week. “We have about 33 days from today until we hand over to baseball operations.”

There will be grandstands down both the first-base and third-base lines with broadcast booths, camera platforms, media positions and video replay included along with audio and video components. Concessions and merchandise will be available for fans on game day.

Any players looking to hit a home run will have to carry 400 feet to clear center field, 375 in the alleys and 330 down each base line.

True renovations always reveal something owners don’t expect. The same goes for Bristol officials, who found out they won’t have to replace everything after Aug. 2.

They won’t have to replace the Sunoco pumps and tanks with NASCAR now bringing those to each race, Swift said. The Sunoco signs also are gone instead of sitting in center field. Half an infield building was removed to clear space for the outfield wall.

Bristol has loads of experience with extreme track makeovers from bringing in dump trucks of dirt for races. When the track hosted a college football game in the Battle of Bristol in 2016, it drew an NCAA-record 156,990 fans.

Interest has been great, and MLB is planning a lot of events before the first pitch with Pitbull and Tim McGraw already set to perform in a pregame concert from a stage in the infield.

Country star Jake Owen will highlight more performances outside the track. The fan zone also will feature the Commissioner’s Trophy, a 110-foot Ferris wheel, a food truck row, pitching tunnels and batting cages, team mascots, and branded MLB stock cars for photos.

Bristol will have a chance at the record for the largest crowd to see a baseball game. A March 2008 exhibition between the Red Sox and Dodgers at Los Angeles Coliseum drew 115,300.

Once the Reds and Braves wrap up and all the fans leave, the next challenge will begin. The Bristol team will race against the clock to restore the infield so that it can accommodate a night race in the NASCAR playoffs on Sept. 13.

“There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the speedway,” Swift said.

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