If you’re an eagle-eyed viewer of this weekend’s NASCAR action from Bristol Motor Speedway, you might notice that The Last Great Colosseum looks a little cleaner than it did this time last year.
After three years, NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports, Inc. have called it quits on the Bristol dirt race experiment, and for the foreseeable future, it looks as though both annual Cup races at the Tennessee short track will be held on the concrete surface we know and love — at least until Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s campaign to bring back asphalt gains ground. The Cup Series’ return to dirt was as temporary as the surface itself, as each year 2,300 truckloads of Tennessee clay was hauled in — and then, after the checkered flag fell on Easter Sunday, it was trucked back out again.
But was three times the charm?
Last year’s dirt race saw 3.45 million viewers, down from just over 4 million the year before, and after Christopher Bell led the entire final stage, the mood on Twitter (as the micro-blogging website was then known) was dire.
Why was NASCAR forcing a Next Gen car so clearly developed for paved surface racing to compete on dirt? Why were they taking away a concrete Bristol date – one of the greatest days of the year in American motorsports! — for this? Why did they choose Easter Sunday? Why was it always raining?
But if there’s one thing you can count on with NASCAR fans, it’s begging for something to be replaced and then lamenting the fact that it’s gone: Chicagoland Speedway, the Car of Tomorrow, the Latford system. I’ll bet that, this time next week, tunes will have changed on the dirt.
Yes, concrete Bristol has locked out the all-time podium on Jeff Gluck’s “Was It a Good Race?” poll, but those three races have one thing in common: they were back in the Gen 6 era. Of the two concrete Bristol dates since NASCAR switched to the Next Gen car and its powerful rear diffuser, at most 61.6% of fans have approved of its racing action – and that was the 2023 race that saw Denny Hamlin lead 141 of the final 142 laps, a dominant enough performance to quip that he ‘beat your favorite driver … all of them.’
The problem lies deeper than (track) surface level. Switching from dirt to concrete isn’t going to fix the…
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