Heading Back To Nashville Superspeedway, For Better Or Worse?

This upcoming weekend, all three of NASCARʻs premier touring series will be visiting Nashville Superspeedway.  If you are one to believe in spirits smiling down at us, then this would be time to postulate that Bruton Smith, who passed away Wednesday, is enjoying the sport making a stop at one of his tracks just after his death.

One might wonder, however, if the joke is on everyone else.  The addition of Nashville to the NASCAR calendar came at a time when shuffling and re-shuffling the schedule became a vital element of keeping the sport going during COVID restrictions and curious circumstances.  That the track basically took one of Doverʻs spots on the calendar is an added aspect of the changes.

One of the funny parts of the swap is that the series replaced one concrete track with another, as Nashville is now the longest concrete track on the schedule.  Whether or not that is a good thing may be up for debate.

The inaugural Cup race in 2021 featured a host of brake and tire failures that led to a total of 11 cautions for 60 laps.  For a race that is 300 laps long, having one-fifth of them taken by yellow-flag slowdowns does not equate to brilliant racing.  And if you canʻt remember, somehow Kyle Larson squeezed enough gas out of his tank to hold off Ross Chastain for the win.  Funny that Chastain has more wins than the defending champion Larson at this point in the year––who could have seen that coming?

Fascinating questions aside, the Nashville trip is a peculiar one.  Had Bruton Smith and Speedway Motorsports not acquired Dover Motorsports (for roughly $132 million) then it is likely that not only is there no Cup race last year or this year, but there is reason to wonder whether Nashville Superspeedway would even exist.

(A quick aside: just what is it that makes some tracks Superspeedways and others just Speedways?  What are the parameters?  Who decides?  Is there a governing body of superspeedway-ness?  Does someone just point at the track and say, “itʻs super”?  At least it is not an International Superspeedway because then we donʻt have to worry about what itʻs wearing or if it is dating a Spanish, Italian, or Greek supermodel.)

While NBC Sports/USA network/whichever other network on the NBC platform will be involved in broadcasting the race might make mention of Nashvilleʻs history there is reason to re-examine things.  Nashville, born in 2001, began hosting Xfinity, Trucks, and IndyCar races that year but Cup…