The Unofficial Crown Jewel Squandered by Its Spot on the Calendar

There are 36 races to win at the NASCAR Cup Series level, and winning the Bristol Night Race is easily within the top half dozen, if not directly behind NASCAR’s de facto crown jewel races in prestige.

A Saturday night showdown between the Cup Series’ finest drivers at the Last Great Coliseum — a 0.533-mile short track in Bristol, Tenn., with high-banked turns and stadium-section seating that can house nearly 150,000 cheering, screaming fans — is one of NASCAR’s greatest traditions.

For one Saturday night each summer, the NASCAR world makes the pilgrimage to Bristol Motor Speedway for 500 laps of action-packed, close-quarters racing. The cars zip by the start/finish line every 15 seconds, and the drivers have to navigate the 2,000 turns, the treacherous high banking, the accidents and their own tempers before the king that successfully vanquishes all his foes is rewarded with the victorious gladiator sword.

The Bristol Night Race is not only of the most prestigious races on the calendar, but also one of the most exciting.

And with that excitement, it’s sad to see such an extraordinary event suffer a slow, suffocating decline into irrelevance at the hands of one of the nation’s favorite pastimes: college football.

We’re already into the third week of college football season, and the Bristol Night Race is forced to compete against the marquee college football matchups on an annual basis, with zero success.

Just look at last year’s event, the one where Denny Hamlin beat everyone’s favorite driver: 1.562 million viewers on USA Network, for a race that was run at its scheduled time. Look at the prior years when the race was broadcast on NBC Sports, and it’s not much better: 2.1 million viewers in 2020, 2.2 million viewers in 2021 and 1.776 million viewers in 2022.

One of NASCAR’s most prestigious races has turned into a shell of itself, becoming one of the Cup Series’ least-watched events on an annual basis. And the fact that a race as important as the Bristol Night Race has been pushed off network television to be broadcast on cable is nothing short of absurd.

This hasn’t always been the case.

The move to mid-September was made at the start of the 2020 season, which was intended to put Bristol in the playoffs as the final race of the Round of 16. Before that, the Night Race had been traditionally run the weekend before Labor Day, as that Saturday night sweet spot on the schedule was right…