Overhyping Of Short Tracks Hits Again In Finale Of 2018

Talladega's October weekend was a tale of two radically different races.   The Truck 250 was a highly-competitive affair with some very aggressive push-drafting and a last-lap crash; when it was over Timothy Peters grabbed the win, his first since 2015 and first in Maury Gallagher's Chevrolets.

The slicing and dicing in the Truck 250 stood in surprising contrast to the Diehard 500 where the Stewart-Haas Racing Fords lined up together and displayed a power like race sponsor One Thousand Bulbs  - an online lighting retailer.  The SHR Fords refused to race each other, playing the team-order game to a strikingly effective - and controversial - degree.

But it's been the subsequent Old Dominion 500 weekend that's caused recent excitement.   Martinsville had the usual incidence of crashes - including a pit road gaffe by Clint Bowyer with William Byron -  as Joey Logano led some 300 laps before late-race pit shuffling put Logano back in the lead.

But it was Martin Truex who tried to steal the show - and wound up getting the win stolen on him.   Truex was livid at Logano afterward, and he arguably has a case for anger - he raced Logano clean (something too many racers seem to have forgotten how to execute) and Logano swerved him.

The Old Dominion 500 finish brought back memory of Logano's introduction to national racing and the 2009 Toyota Showdown at Irwindale Speedway.


The buffoonery at Martinsville marred what was developing into a memorable finish regardless of outcome, and the action brought yet more social and regular-media hype about how good short track racing is.   NBC analyst Jeff Burton - a winner at Martinsville in 1997 in a good clean nose-to-nose dice with Bobby Hamilton - stated on his Twitter account that "the combination of a short track and the Playoffs.....(meant) these drivers are under more pressure to perform than ever before."

Which leads, though, to the obvious - so where, Jeff, are the 35 lead changes?  The track has broken 30 official lead changes three times this decade and even such races at Burton's 1997 win, Hamilton's subsequent 1998 win, John Andretti's 1999 win, to name three, were genuinely competitive affairs even though they didn't reach that level, so Martinsville has unquestionably been a legitimately competitive track. 

Yet the hype for "more short tracks" after such races continues the deplorable approach of pitting speedways against each other and sells short tracks as more than what they are.  

It is illustrated most graphically in Dave Moody's postrace blog posting, a piece worth a response.


Moody is flat wrong about why the speedway building boom of 1996 onward favored 1.5-mile tracks - that design was chosen because it was large enough for 100,000-plus seating and luxury boxes, small enough to avoid the criticism that "we can't see the whole track," and was a competition model that had delivered quality racing.

As shown in the 1997 Vegas BGN 300, the 1.5 milers are fundamentally sound as a competition venue.  

Atlanta became a very competitive race for four seasons 1999-2003 as a quad-oval.

Moody's assertion that "Over the last five to seven years the best racing in NASCAR has invariably been found on the short tracks and the road courses," is also not true.   The best racing in the decade by far has been on the restrictor plate tracks.   Pocono has also seen some strikingly physical racing, notably the crash-torn 2010 season.   And the most celebrated Winston Cup race of this span remains Fontana in 2013.  That doesn't mean there haven't been memorable short track races in that span; it means the maligned bigger tracks have delivered as well.

An irony is the collapse of popularity of Bristol, which altered its corners to where by 2010 there was sustained side by side racing up front as had been the case there in 1989-91 - racing that was notably cleaner than the one-groove demo derbies that permeated the track 1992-2009.   And fans began protesting against it - there was unavoidable verbiage to get Bristol back to the one-groove mess it had been.   Fickle fans, indeed.

The main gripe about bigger tracks is aeropush, which ignores where aeropush began - at Martinsville.   Bobby Hamilton following the 1996 Old Dominion 500 stated there was aerodynamic push in the cars in that race.   Short track aeropush has been reality as long as aeropush has existed, making utter nonsense of the indictment of bigger tracks.

Related is the common claim that on short tracks "aero doesn't matter."   Any casual look at Late Models shows this statement is laughable - Late Models look more like superspeedway cars than today's superspeedway cars do.   And back in the day the aerodynamic rake of Richard Petty's mid-80s Pontiacs was compared to the aero rake of dirt cars.


Moody claims fans are "voting with their wallets and credit cards."   Are they?   The short tracks NASCAR has haven't sold any better than superspeedways; Bristol in particular posted a very solid crowd in its recent Volunteer 500 but some of its recent Southeastern 500 crowds have been shockingly nonexistent.   And this recent Martinsville race was anything but sold out - which led to a Twitter rant during the Truck 250 there that fans who claim to want more short tracks need to come out and actually support the short tracks.

Moody indicts several races like the Brickyard Xfinity 250 in advocating returning the Xfinity series to Indy Raceway Park.   The phase-in of the NA18D draft duct package in that race in its last two runnings makes complete nonsense of dropping the Brickyard in favor of a forgettable bullring.   No IRP race ever measured up to the 2017-18 Brickyard 250s in competitive excellence.

The same is true of the Truck Series, whose big track races have been competitive to a level its 1995-2000 run primarily on short tracks never was.   Moody uses the cliché "return to its roots."  The cliché in blunt fact means "drag the sport back to the farm" - regression.

Moody also repeats the claim that the schedules will be shaken up after 2020 when the present set of sanctioning agreements expires.   The claim has never held up credibly because of a complete lack of logic - the sport is going to drop races on big tracks in good markets in favor of bullrings in weak markets?   Often advocated is moving Cup dates to Iowa Speedway - a track owned by NASCAR and which would already have gotten Cup dates if the concept was in any way credible.

"The excitement generated by the Charlotte Roval and Martinsville in recent weeks is difficult to ignore."   The superior racing in the Talladega Truck 250 is also difficult to ignore.  The excellent racing generated by the coming NA18D package is also difficult to ignore.   NASCAR needs to field the most competitive racing the sport can get, and the objective reality is it is not a case for more short tracks.