NASCAR's first Winston Cup weekend hit Martinsville and soon after the 2020 schedule was released to great fanfare and a lot of wild speculation, some of which turned out to be true.
First up is the Virginia 500 weekend. Brad Keselowski annihilated the field for his second win of the season and Chase Elliott wound up second, the best finish so far for Chevrolet. But two issues rose above everything else - first was the dismal effort by Jimmie Johnson, and more than a few analysts noticed how badly he ran, with the inevitable speculation about what's wrong.
The other big picture story was that the writers suddenly noticed that aero matters on short tracks. The gripe was the bigger spoiler was somehow creating aeropush, but that's false. Aeropush was always there and the bigger spoiler allowed the drivers to blast through the corners more strongly. It wasn't harder to pass in this Martinsville than it was with low downforce; actually the opposite was the case - lower downforce made passing harder.
That aero was suddenly noticed at Martinsville shows how ignorant of history a lot of people seem to be. Bobby Hamilton in the 1990s was the first to articulate that aeropush was and is a short track issue. And the aero rake on short track cars - especially dirt cars - long ago proved aero is more, not less, important on short tracks - pavement late models look more like superspeedway cars than modern superspeedway cars look.
People need to give up this myth of "making the cars less dependent on aero." Because that's all it's ever been - "less dependent on aero" is a myth, through and through.
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The other story two days later was the unveiling of the 2020 Winston Cup schedule. Social media had some ridiculous speculation that some tracks would lose dates in favor of unimpressive locales like Villenueve Circuit, Mosport, Iowa Speedway, even Indy Raceway Park. That didn't happen as any sensible analysis could have predicted. Also not happening is elimination of the playoff format, the source of a pre-Martinsville rumor.
What did happen though led to expected puzzlement. The most bizarre is Pocono Raceway has to stack both of its Winston Cup dates into just one weekend - late June. Back to back 400 milers (they should be 500 milers) in two days compresses into too tight a window for teams with inevitable attrition, bringing back memory of the track's 1969 birth where it ran short track races on its now-defunct 3/4-mile interior oval and its ration of entries was always cut because of attrition at other tracks running the night before. Plus it is just one weekend, a revenue-generation reduction by any measure. No Steve O'Donnell (his presser transcript here), crushing two big races into one weekend isn't "terrific for the fans."
The bizarre move - the only such doubleheader - appears forced because NBC is airing the Summer Olympics in 2020 in July and August that year - which brings to mind the sport should not have constricted itself to two networks but instead should be getting four or five with CBS, TNT, etc. being brought in. It also leaves one wondering if this is thus a one-off experiment, one the sport really doesn't need.
The other changes are moving the Brickyard 400 to July 4 and the Firecracker 400 at Daytona at the end of August. One struggles to see what need ever arose for such changes, and Steve O'Donnell dressed Daytona's move in terms of NASCAR's misbegotten playoff format, since the Firecracker 400 is now the "regular season" finale and the Southern 500 kicks off the playoffs.
Darlington, Richmond, Bristol, Vegas, Talladega, Charlotte's stupid roval, Kansas, Texas, the Old Dominion 500 in November instead of September, and then Phoenix are the playoff races. This even though the playoff concept has never worked - indeed the fact of a rumor circulating to the effect of ending the experiment indicates there is understanding in the racing industry the playoff format has not worked despite NASCAR's stubborn insistence on shoving it down our throats.
In all the new schedule is "fixing" what had no need for a makeover. If NASCAR thinks this will spur renewed interest they're kidding themselves.
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