August 31, 2007
By Chuck Wallace

Last Saturday night’s Sharpie 500 has left me to a good deal of soul searching. True NASCAR fans don’t watch racing for the wrecks right? That’s just a cliché that people say when they don’t know what they’re talking about -- sort of like watching the NBA just for the dunks. Right? Then why was the night race at Bristol so disappointing and can anything be done about it?

Saturday afternoon, I called my friends and sent emails reminding everyone that this was the one race of the year that they should be sure to watch. “It’s Bristol baby!” I told them. The drivers and media have their Daytona and Indianapolis, but Bristol is for the fans. And from what I had heard, the new racing surface -- the result of a five-month reconstruction -- was going to produce great racing. As usual, I was nearly giddy when the green flag flew at Thunder Valley.

Giddiness faded to mild enthusiasm. “Looks like Kasey Kahne is pretty strong,” I thought. “Good for them. And here comes the 8 car!” But as the laps ticked away … and ticked away … and ticked away, I got an unpleasant feeling in my gut. No cautions and not a single car had a donut on the door. What have they done to Bristol? Num quid sacri? (Is anything sacred?).

There was, however, some good racing going on. Cars were side-by-side throughout the field. At times the high groove looked superior, at others, the low groove appeared faster. The new variably banked surface yielded more room for drivers to actually race rather than having to pass with the old “chrome horn” (the car’s front bumper) as with the Bristol of old. Denny Hamlin, who was the first significant car out of the race, didn’t sound disappointed. “"For our car to perform the way it did today was amazing. I couldn't be happier to drive it. I could just go anywhere I wanted to with the thing, and it would go,” Hamlin said. And from how the cars looked on the track, I bet most drivers agreed.

Surely, having multiple grooves shouldn’t kill a race. Richmond and Dover have more than one way around the track and produce some of the series’ most exciting races. And at Bristol, there was a lot of good racing going on -- but for some reason it just wasn’t that exciting. No, that’s being nice; it was a snoozer. But why?

Reports suggest that Goodyear intended to bring a good, hard tire to Bristol, out of an abundance of “caution” -- an unfortunate word choice in this context given the relative absence of yellow flags Saturday night. With a new racing surface and the tire test for the Cup series on the new surface rained out, Goodyear was left to use data from the Busch cars’ test and just guess on the rest. As it turns out, it is likely that the hard, “safe” tire is our culprit.

In the past, tires meant something at Bristol. In 1999, Terry Labonte led the night race as laps wound down. However, when Jeremy Mayfield spun and Labonte slowed for the caution, Darrell Waltrip nudged him in the rear and spun him out. Terry, as irate as the gentleman from Texas ever was on national television, ducked onto pit road for fresh tires and then proceeded to come from fifth to second in a lap and a half, setting up the famous finish with Dale Earnhardt that put Terry in the wall and resulted in the very unusual booing of Earnhardt in victory lane.

No, it wasn’t the new racing surface that kept Saturday’s race from finishing like the 1999 Goody’s 500. In fact, if Dale and Terry had the new surface in 1999, they may have gone side by side for the final two laps, inching slightly ahead or falling slightly behind as they gutted it out for a photo finish rather than Dale having to “rattle Terry’s cage” to get by him. It wasn’t the surface that precluded such an exciting finish. It was the tire.

The bottom line is that tires were never an issue in the Sharpie 500. The leaders all went between 100 and 130 laps on their last set of tires -- that’s a quarter of the race … on one set of tires … at Bristol, and didn’t really suffer for it. Rusty Wallace observed that the leaders’ lap times never really fell off as they moved through the tire run, and that, folks, makes for boring racing. There was no pit strategy. Cars didn’t vary in performance as their tires faded. There were no heroic dashes back to the front with new tires. Tires were simply never an issue in the Sharpie 500 and with plenty of room to race on the new surface, the result was less than exciting to say the least.

Even race winner Carl Edwards recognized the problem, suggesting that fans should give the new track another chance. "When they bring out a more aggressive tire, you will see guys coming from the back, and I think you'll see it shook up a little bit more than you did." Edwards said that softer tires could make Bristol a “spectacular” race again. We’re all hoping he’s right.

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.