I’m not blaming the drivers who put on an exciting race. I also appreciate NASCAR coming up with ideas for attracting new fans. And when I heard they were going to do this, I marked out as much as anyone.
But the execution was a disaster. The races were delayed because of track conditions. Tires were chewed up into rubber mulch. Cars overheated when their engines got clogged with mud. And several drivers reported they couldn’t even seen through their windshields, which doesn’t sound very safe.
But the worst part? By lap 17 of the NASCAR Cup event, the asphalt was all but completely exposed making me wonder what was the point of this? It wasn’t even a dirt track race: it was a typical asphalt race with some crap thrown on top just to make things more difficult for the drivers.
It was like throwing thumbtacks on a hockey rink, saturating an NBA court with water, or forcing baseball players to not wear caps just to make the game needlessly harder.
Want to have NASCAR on a dirt track? Pick a true dirt track (like Tony Stewart’s) and have the boys race in true dirt track cars. This ended up being a joke.
I didn’t follow up on this, but it sure struck me as odd when I saw photos in the paper of dirt being dumped on the track. I wondered how it would turn out. Seems, not so great.
There have been successful paved-to-dirt conversions in the past at Bristol, for a few years running. They’d kept all the dirt they used nearby so they didn’t have to go far to put it back on. This year, they did it differently and there was all kinds of technical fooferah going on.
Granted, I didn’t watch it. Also, in years previous, they didn’t have to handle flash-flooding. THIS much flooding this year.
There was up to nine feet of dirt ( to reduce the angle of banking ), the asphalt was never exposed, what you saw as black asphalt was the tampered dirt taking on rubber from the tires wearing out.
I somehow missed this. The answer is no, there isn’t. It’s literally thousands of truckloads of dirt hauled in, dumped out, graded and tamped down. When they want to go back to pavement, they dig it up, put it into trucks and haul it off.
Though the dirt is usually kept nearby so it doesn’t involve quite so much trucking, it’s still an awful lot of work.
And I’m all for other tracks being used, but Bristol’s something special in that it’s basically a giant stadium that houses a track, as opposed to a track with some grandstands built around it.
One thing about racing on dirt is that it’s a great way to encourage mask usage by the audience. It looked like a dust storm in there.
Why was it so dusty anyway? I’m not a race fanatic, but I’ve seen other dirt track races on TV and I don’t remember them being obscured by a dust cloud.
It was also a really fun race. Not seeing why anyone would consider a joke.
Races get delayed due to rain all the time. Daytona this year was delayed for almost 6 hours. The chewed up tires and overheating due to mud are features not bugs.
Highly entertaining. I’m looking forward to them going to back to it next year.
Well, no, I’m sure you weren’t utterly serious, but I would have hoped there was a more elegant solution than one of basic haulage. The solution was so mundane as to be nearly boring. I wasn’t trying to insult your intelligence, so mea culpa.
I’m guessing that most dirt races are much shorter, which affords time for a water truck to go back out and wet the track down between events. The Chili Bowl National’s longest single race is “only” 25 laps, for instance.
Bristol’s event was several hundred laps, though interspersed with breaks. There must have been a monstrous cushion built up near the end of it.
Clint in the booth said that the dirt is different in the mid-west and less dusty then the southern dirt. Someone should do some research to find the least dusty dirt for racing.
