NASCAR’s first crack at putting on a show for the Bristol Dirt Race was anything but perfect.
The quality of racing in the final half of the race dulled in comparison to the first 100 laps and change. The visibility through the dust that accumulated in the race track and the glare of the sun made for some dangerous viewpoints for the drivers. You could say there was a bit too many cautions, especially in the Truck race.
All of these were challenges, but those challenges should have been expected.
This was NASCAR’s first crack at this and there’s a ton of things – admittedly – that need to big fixed. I’ll dive into those, but when they announced at the track that the facility would be doing the same thing with the dirt for 2022, my heart got jumpy.
I think putting in the right feedback will help them make this event a really unique, benchmark 0n the schedule.
But we’ve still got more racing to come on the track. Both the World of Outlaws Late Models and Sprint Cars will be taking to it in April in what I’m confident will be some of the biggest races the series hosts this year.
I’m incredibly excited for that, but I don’t think they’d be happening if the Cup Series didn’t do the dirt race we saw on Monday.
Now, with that being said, there’s an understanding with the fans that are calling for NASCAR to just send its top tour to a real dirt track – one that the normal dirt tours run at every season. The Truck Series is headed to Knoxville Raceway, why couldn’t the Cup Series go with them.
I hear that all day long.
But if NASCAR can inch closer to perfection with how it puts on a dirt race at Bristol, who’s to say that we won’t get a second one on the schedule? On top of that, there’s rumors of NASCAR exploring adding a street course to schedule at some point in the 36-race rotation.
When it comes to that, too, I think that’s as ideal as it gets for a schedule.
“The fans had asked us for years to look at innovation around the schedule. In fact, we’ve been taken to task for not making some moves,” NASCAR’s Steve O’Donnell said. “We were bold and aggressive this year. I’m proud of the team for doing that, proud of the industry for taking a chance here. Marcus Smith, his team. What Steve Swift did for putting this track together was incredible, the amount of hours he put together. Really happy for the work he did as well.”
What other series runs at dirt tracks, street courses, road courses, super speedways, short tracks, and a couple of cookie cutters?
I think that would put NASCAR in a different class than its in now and that’s a reason to be excited. Adding a crown jewel to the World of Outlaws schedules is just the cherry on top.
Now I want to get into issues we saw today.
How we can fix Bristol Dirt for the future
There were obviously plenty of problems when looking at the first Bristol Dirt Race.
I think the biggest one that sticks out to me is racing this at night – and with TV, finding a spot do that in March is going to be tough.
You’re competing against March Madness and FOX seems to have the biggest crush on slapping races in the middle of the afternoon, rather than noon or 8 p.m. ET on a Sunday.
Pairing that with the rain issues that we’ve seen at Bristol over the years, I’d like to see NASCAR move this race a little further back in the schedule to somewhere around late April.
Getting it right outside that opening week of baseball buzz where sports chill out a little bit would be really big for the TV audience and I think it can give the schedule more character towards the middle.
That obviously won’t fix the other things we saw on Monday.
“I think you probably need to get with the dirt guys a little bit more or ask them,” Denny Hamlin said when asked what NASCAR could do better,” “But the dust hindered the ability — the single-file racing as much as anything. You could not get out of the groove or else you were just running on dust. I don’t know if there’s different dirt that doesn’t produce as much dust as this one. I know they really did a lot of research on the dirt itself. A couple of them said if you didn’t run during the daylight, dust wouldn’t be as bad.”
Hamlin added that the visibility issues may have contributed a bit to the rate of cautions we saw throughout the day in both the Truck and Cup Series races.
Some suggested bringing in a different type of dirt that doesn’t dust up as much, but I think the race length might be the biggest thing to look at.
The dust-ups didn’t really start coming in until the later part of Stage 2, and the race certainly – in my opinion – carried enough action ahead of the break on lap 150.
If NASCAR wanted to shorten up the race to 150 laps or pair qualifying races on the same day, I see no reason it wouldn’t get the same entertainment value out of the race. That was the structure the series used when it went to Eldora in the past.
That race of course always ran at night.
“I’m not a dirt expert by (any) means, but I do think that racing at night is the key to this,” Logano said during his race winner press conference.
We’ll see what happens, and today was all about trial-and-error, but I am damn excited to see this coming back to the schedule in 2022. Hopefully it brings more dirt action to the schedule, but that was a heck of a fun time.
