MARTINSVILLE, Va. – On Friday night (April 14), during the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race on the half-mile short track of Martinsville Speedway, history was made.
NASCAR, for the first time in its 75-year history, raced in rainy conditions on an oval.
The evening began as a warm and humid evening as pre-race ceremonies went underway during the 200-lap event’s originally scheduled time. However, only mere moments after the 36-truck field’s engines were commanded to fire, a perfectly timed lightning bolt struck in the nearby area of the Virginian short track.
With that, the field fell silent and teams, fans, officials and all of the evening’s attendees were forced to take shelter for an extended period of time while the Appalachian thunderstorms came and went.
However, the track was only partly dried when NASCAR officials made the call for teams to whip out the treaded Goodyear tires and prepare to race on the wet racing surface.
It was the first time in the sport’s history that NASCAR has ever made such a call, and post-race, it was met with mixed emotions.
“I’m not a fan of driving the wets on the road courses,” Stewart Friesen told Frontstretch. “But it was really cool to kind of start. It was different. It was unique.
“It was just as different as racing dirt on Bristol [Motor Speedway].”
“They seemed ok for me,” Tanner Gray told Frontstretch. “I can see a lot of people around me struggling, but I think that if we would have got another shot at them, a lot of people would have figured him out a little bit quicker, realized that there was maybe a little bit more grip there than what you expected.
“I don’t know. It was actually pretty dry,” Ty Majeski told Frontstretch. “It was a little bit wet down the straight away, but corners were dry. So, it was just less grip up with the rain tires obviously being rain tires.
“And the biggest thing is that they’re actually just road course rain tires, so they don’t have any stagger. So, we were just super, super tight.”
I mean, honestly, I was doubtful at first going and doing it,” Taylor Gray told Frontstretch. “I didn’t think it was going to work. I thought it wasn’t going to be a good show, but it really wasn’t that…
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