Bristol - This Is The Hardest Ticket?

Over and over we hear about how Bristol International Raceway - the original moniker before it was purchased by Bruton Smith - is the hardest ticket to get for NASCAR events, especially at the Winston Cup level. As the track celebrates its 45th anniversary this year, one is hard-pressed to understand why tickets there are so popular.

Bristol is a half-mile bowl, initially designed both for racing and to hold football games in its infield (the trioval grass at Daytona had a similar intent). Banked at 18 degrees when first built in 1961, the banking was increased to 36 degrees to make the track more of a superspeedway than a short track. "If you ask me, they ruined a perfectly good racetrack," Richard Petty said after a crash-plagued race there in July 1969.

The track was owned by Larry Carrier for the majority of its existence. In the late 1970s Gary Baker bought an ownership take and industrialist Warner Hodgedon bought the track along with several other short tracks in the early 1980s, before the collapse of his businesses ended his involvement in racing after 1984. Carrier reacquired the speedway, but in 1996 it was purchased by Bruton Smith.

The track was asphalt for its first 31 years but in 1992 Carrier switched to concrete, because of endless work treating the asphalt. The switch to concrete wiped out most of the old track's raceability, wiping out a consistent high groove. It has been a single-file track ever since.

But it is packed with crashes, and in March 2006 the crashes were plentiful amid periodic snow; in BGN's 300-lapper some 25 cars were involved, and it says something both about the determination of raceteams to finish races and about both the absurdity of said effort plus NASCAR's Lucky Dog rules that very few cars failed to finish the BGN event despite all the wreck damage.

The win by Kyle Busch is unlikely to have set off much fan rejoicing given the yongster's burgeoning unpopularity; it also graphically displays the BGN Series' weakness as a series, in the near-complete lack of competitive stand-alone series regulars. One of the few who did do something was John Andretti, driving PPC Racing's #10 Ford en route to ninth, his best finish in a NASCAR race in three years.

With the race's lack of up-front passing, one is hard-pressed to call it a good race. It nonetheless remains the hardest ticket in NASCAR.