Chase Elliott’s victory Sunday (April 14) in the AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 (there’s a limit on how long a race name can be before it gets ridiculous, and this one has crossed it, but that’s a whole other story) was a long time coming.
And because of that, and a few wild late restarts, a lot of people are going to look at the latest show from Texas Motor Speedway as a success. And that might be going too far.
It’s possible to have a good race with an anticlimactic ending, and it’s also possible to have a dud of a race with a decent finish.
Sunday was the latter, and on its own? That’s totally OK. Over the course of a season, you’re going to have some great races and some real clunkers and a whole of them somewhere between those.
Before Elliott became the lipstick on Sunday’s pig of a race, a lot of fans and also a lot of drivers were ready to see the current Texas configuration ride off into the sunset (or maybe just be crushed by an Acme anvil launched by an overzealous coyote).
The Next Gen car has helped the racing on the mile-and-a-half tracks considerably. A couple of years ago, everyone was just trying to figure out the car. If you want to understand how much they’ve learned over the last couple of years, look at Jimmie Johnson’s effort on Sunday. Where he is now is where the full-timers were then.
Anyway, the racing on the intermediates is generally better than a few years ago, but some tracks are better than others. And they’re all better than Texas.
Giving credit where it’s due, part of that is a reconfiguration that Speedway Motorsports unveiled in 2018. In an attempt to make the track different from its cookie-cutter counterparts, the idea was to make the two ends of the track completely different from each other. That’s a lot of what makes Darlington Raceway so good, so in itself it wasn’t a terrible idea at all — kudos for the track for trying something to make the races better at a time when the intermediate races were less than compelling.
In practice, though, and especially combined with years of spreading on traction compound like jelly on toast, it didn’t work.
Racing the track is good. It puts races in the drivers’ hands. But multiple cars hitting the wall because the surface is a bumpy disaster isn’t that. There were times on Sunday when it looked like cars couldn’t race side-by-side…
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