LDN - Sports

Bristol's dramatic stage could receive jolt by new format

[April 21, 2017] By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange

Once a monument to stock car short track racing with grandstands climbing to the sky like the surrounding mountains, the Bristol Motor Speedway is looking to turn around hard racing times.

In an era when promoters are removing seats, one of NASCAR's most picturesque tracks retains its coliseum-type seating for two reasons. First, it would be hard to remove sections of seats in a way that would not blight the stadium. And second, last year's Battle of Bristol NCAA football game sold in excess of 150,000 tickets.

In the good ol' days, a ticket to the "World's Fastest Half Mile" was as tough as getting an invitation to The Masters. Those who had season tickets held on to them and there was a long waiting list. You had to know somebody to get in.

There were so many regular race fans that entire sections of the grandstands knew each other like relatives. But demand for tickets to Sunday's race, the eighth round of this year's Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, is decidedly tepid relative to the number of seats.

The new stage format will introduce two more additional opportunities for drivers to race to the flag stand, maybe with some bump-and-run. But will it be enough?

It's easy to trace the downturn of racing fortunes of the "The Last Great Colosseum," located north of the Great Smokys near the Tennessee side of the border with Virginia. The slowdown began when the half-mile track was reconfigured in 2007 with graduated banking, creating a two-groove race track.

In perhaps a sign of promoters' hubris at the time, fans were not consulted about their passion for the single low groove tap-and-turn track, where contact was a virtual necessity for passing.

Fans didn't like the new two-groove track with graduated 24-degree banking that made for more polite racing. Further, there were other developments that alienated fans. It was the dawn of the Great Recession as well as the arrival of the Car of Tomorrow and Jimmie Johnson's streak of five straight NASCAR championships. Johnson, who now has seven championships, was well known for racing everybody cleanly, even at Bristol.

For those who took exception to Gentleman Jimmie, the short tracks were anathema to a new era of driving compared to the days of Dale Earnhardt. The latter was known at Bristol for rattling roll cages and for doing things like turning Terry Labonte around to get to victory lane.

Once demand for tickets dwindled, the spring race at Bristol suffered the most. The track could no longer force fans to buy the spring race tickets annually as part of a package in order to renew their tickets for the insanely popular night race in August. The summer race still prevails in terms of preference, although it, too, is hurting.

The track was repaved in 2012 in hopes of re-installing the single groove aspect, but it didn't happen. Instead, the track gradually developed a slower lower groove. It was the bottom of the "bottom groove" malaise, which at one point got so bad that driver Brad Keselowski chastised those in the media critical of the problem, saying they were just trying to bump up readership and ratings.

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The racing fans have voted with their feet -- or perhaps more accurately with their hands by sitting on them and staying home. Meanwhile, football fans are awaiting the next opportunity for a Battle of Bristol to take place in the slow-moving world of NCAA football schedules.

Bristol, part of the Speedway Motorsports, Inc. empire run by Bruton Smith, became the poster track for assuming fans loved NASCAR racing so much they would put up with anything to see it.

When times were good, traffic was bad due to the track's location on a four-lane highway far from any interstate -- despite efforts to manage it. Last summer, after a rain delay cleared much of the 60,000 in the crowd away early, the traffic was still bad.

On the other hand, traffic concerns and mediocre amenities didn't stop over 150,000 football fans from showing up to see local rivals Tennessee and Virginia Tech last September.

Now it's a matter of managing a difficult situation and trying to recover a sense of trying to do what's right for fans. That includes putting down resin last summer to improve speed in the lower groove. The resin is similar to what is used to generate more traction on Bristol's drag strip.

"They had a pretty good insight on what they needed to do to the bottom after the Drivers Council and NASCAR got together and told them what we thought we needed to do to try to make better racing at Bristol," Kevin Harvick said in advance of this weekend's race. "So, they were all in. This is just a classic example of collaboration between SMI, NASCAR and the Drivers Council and seeing the outcome of it was pretty exciting, just because of the fact it does open up options."

Harvick said the resin treatment opened some eyes in August.

"The last few years we'd been there, you get on the bottom of the racetrack and you are three- or four-tenths slower. Now you could hold your ground and get past lapped cars. It gave everybody an option to do something different, and as a driver, that's what you want. You want options."

It is probably too much to ask that the stages introduced this year by NASCAR, which have helped generate better competition, can bring back the old Bristol. Nothing short of contact deciding the stages at 125 and 250 laps as well as the race at the checkered flag after 500 laps is likely to make a big impression.

When the idea of Smith switching one of his race dates to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2018 first came up, Bristol was broached as a track that might lose its spring date. Instead, one of the two SMI races at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway was moved to the West. Ironically, it may be the football game and its profits that kept two dates at Tennessee's only NASCAR Cup track, which continues to tinker with formulas for bringing back the old-time religion.

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