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Bristol: R.I.P.
August 30, 2007
Jay Staton - SCR
After Saturday night’s
race at Bristol Speedway (formerly A.K.A. Thunder Valley)
it truly feels like an old friend is gone.
On paper, everything
looked like it was going to be a big improvement.
The 2008 Car of Tomorrow
(C.O.T) has proven to be tough and has front and rear bumpers that are of similar height and has provided great competition
repeatedly. This writer has been a proponent of the 2008 Car since early pre-wing testing, and still is.
Variable banking greatly
increased the closeness of the show at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and the engineers, the people signing the checks along with
myself thought that it would be a huge improvement at Bristol as well. We were
wrong.
Certainly, some of the competitors
loved it, especially the ones that finished at or near the front. There are impressive statistics regarding the total number
of passes.
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But it was not the rough-edged
Jimmy Spencer kind of Saturday night shootout that many veteran fans are looking forward to fewer-and-fewer times a year as
traditional venues are retired, and certainly not the show that 160,000 fans paid big bucks to see.
Instead, it is now (sniff)
the Worlds Shortest Mile and a Half Track! Put succinctly, it is boring.
Looking back, racing
at the old Bristol is simply how it is done at the most exciting short tracks in the country, notably (the now defunct) Hialeah
Speedway in Florida comes to mind. Remember, (Luke, remember…) it is as follows:
The line is at the bottom,
period, and there are two ways to pass without hitting the car that is to be overtaken. Drive deeper into the turn than the
car in front and make it stick on the outside, preventing your competitor from drifting out to the wall on the next straightaway,
and work your way past to eventually drop down to the low line, or get under the car in front of you down the straightaway
as he drifts up toward the wall, forcing your competitor to give up the preferred low line through the next turn. And then,
there is the third choice—use the notorious “chrome horn”! All three—along with those talented in
holding the car behind them in check-- are an art and a joy to watch.
Parabolic turns negate
all that—and the fast cars that are handling simply breeze by either on the bottom or the top, also negating the talent
of guys like Joe Nemechek, Tony Stewart, or [put your driver’s name here].
The fix is obvious, and
it suggests an even better fix as well!
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Grind off about a foot
of that new concrete near the apron (leveling the surface), and pour about a foot of concrete across the entire surface. Bingo—a
flat 36 degrees of bank again, and at a fraction of the cost of the enormous about of work already completed.
Meanwhile, while giving
Bristol
back it’s Daytona like banking; why not give Daytona and Talladega Bristol like banking? Say, 20 degrees curving up
to 30 or so near the top? In fact, the lower edge of the banking could blend smoothly into the apron.
Imagine—the end
of restrictor plates, the end of the out-of-bounds line, and the end of most of the very real danger to both competitors and
fans alike.
In a perfect world, both
of the above fixes would occur between now and February, 2008. In reality, they will probably just adjust tire compounds and
possibly adjust the aero, and we will just have to tolerate the new racing at Bristol,
along with the very, very old racing at the plate tracks.
Heavy sigh… Goodbye
Bristol. Thanks for the memories Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Tony Stewart
and Jeff Gordon.
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An old colloquialism
is “All good things must come to an end”. And so it will eventually be with ALL things, and yet… we must
find a way to have Faith that there is a purpose, a reason, and a reward.
As with Bristol, life
isn’t always what we hoped it would be, and sometimes not what it was, and losses of an old friend of a race track or
worse yet…an old friend, are a sad time indeed.
But after a time, it is better
to look forward to the next race and the next chance to get it right--at Bristol, at Talladega, or when challenged by the
argumentative Kyle Busch fan at the office water cooler, realizing that in the end, when the final flag falls after the final
season, the very best of Award Ceremonies still awaits!
Questions, Comments;
Email Jay
The
views and opinions in this article are that of the writer(s) and not necessarily that of SCR
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2006 StockCar Review.
