With the reemergence of the fast bottom groove at Bristol Motor Speedway, some of the younger drivers don’t seem to be having a very good time.
“Well…. Bristol used to be fun..” Kyle Larson tweeted Friday night.
“Wonder when we will get to Bristol again,” Ricky Stenhouse Jr. tweeted later.
No offense to those guys, but I hope their version of Bristol never returns. After all, they’re talking about New Bristol — and New Bristol, in case you haven’t noticed, hasn’t exactly been the big hit with fans that Old Bristol was.
Old Bristol was the high-banked, one-groove track where cars had to knock each other out of the way to make a pass on the bottom. It once sold out 55 straight Cup races and the Night Race was the hottest ticket in all of sports because fans knew there was going to be guaranteed action.
New Bristol is the multi-groove track that has witnessed a precipitous decline in attendance starting two years after the track was redone with progressive banking. Drivers can race at New Bristol because they have options, which is good for them but boring for everyone else.
Fans don’t come here to get pumped about a side-by-side battle! They just don’t. NASCAR fans can see racing at every other track on any other week. If you want real racing, go to a 1.5-mile track; there’s plenty of them.
But Bristol became famous for tempers and wrecks and bent-up sheet metal — and fans who travel from hundreds of miles away to rural Tennessee want to see that again, damn it!
The bottom groove was the key to that formula. So the sticky VHT in the low lane — or the “grip strip,” as FOX calls it — is a friend to Bristol race fans.
Let’s hope it lasts. As I write this during final practice, Larson is doing his best to work in the top lane with rubber and show that it’s fast enough for other drivers to follow him. Their hope is enough rubber can be laid down in the top lane to negate the effect of the VHT.
Nooooo! I like Larson — he’s wickedly funny, bluntly honest and out-of-this-world talented — but I hope his top-lane efforts fail this weekend. To be clear, I’m not rooting against him personally — just rooting against a race where the high line is viable.
I want to see a one-groove, bottom-lane race as bad as I want to win the lottery (OK, maybe not that bad, but close).
If the VHT doesn’t make drivers stick to the bottom, I suggest putting spike strips on the top.
UPDATE: The VHT was no match for Larson working in the top lane in the Xfinity race, so forget everything I just said.