As the zMAX CARS Tour looks to get its Late Model Stock Car season underway this weekend at Southern National Motorsports Park, it seems like a fitting time to check in on an interesting experiment the track did with the racing surface last fall.
The biggest story heading into this weekend is obviously the new era of the series, with new title sponsor zMAX on board, a stacked full-time field with a whopping 32 cars on the entry list and even the unfortunate weather with rain pushing the opener from Saturday to Sunday, March 10.
However, a story that may be lost in all of this is the progression of a quite possibly unnecessary experiment that is still a work in progress.
Ahead of last fall’s Thanksgiving Classic at Southern National, the track decided to repave the very top groove of what is a historically bottom-dominant four-groove racetrack.
This left a strip of fresh asphalt around the top of both ends of the track, while the rest of the track remained the same.
The track also put traction compound down on the racing surface in the third groove, just below the fresh asphalt of the top line.
The goal of both changes was to provide more viable lane choices for drivers to utilize and ultimately promote more side-by-side racing, rather than every car being stuck on the bottom of the racetrack.
Unfortunately, neither change has been effective to this point, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. While the thought of this change progressing to effectiveness is intriguing, the end of last year’s Thanksgiving Classic provides an argument that the change isn’t necessary at all.
There are two major reasons why both the traction compound and the repaved top line have proved to be ineffective at this point, those being distance and the track’s cleanliness.
The first of these two reasons is that both are the long way around. Both ends of the racetrack at SNMP are extremely wide, from the entry of the corner all the way to the exit. So even with the added grip from a fresh strip of asphalt of the PJ1 compound, the added drive off the corner doesn’t make up for the time lost by…
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