Who else thinks the schedule is becoming to stagnant with all of the 1 1/2 tracks. They need more road courses.

Only eleven of the 36 races are on 1.5 mile tracks. Plus the biggest problem you have is Bruton Smith, his company Speedway Motorsports Inc owns five of the eight 1.5 mile tracks on the schedule and NASCAR arent going to upset the man that runs a third of the schedule and owns the most important track on the schedule in Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Yes it would be nice for a small shake up, would prefer to see more in the way of short tracks than the road courses, they have always been more of a novelty race a couple of times a year and apart from the odd good finish at Watkins Glen between very aggressive drivers, usually containing the names Busch, Keslowski or Ambrose, the road courses, especially Sonoma, can be a bit dull as they always turn into pit strategy battles, or who can save the most fuel till the end.

To be honest, compared with some motor sport formulas around the world, NASCAR has less issues than most, the pool of potential winners each weekend as a percentage is bigger than most formulas and as a whole, the package isnt that bad currently. The purist will say its nothing like the good old days, but nothing is in any form of motorsport, but back then it was fine to drink lots, smoke lots and have sex with as many blondes as possible and it could be worse, you could be an Indycar fan, just look how that discipline is imploding through dramatic changes.

WRAJoe wrote:Who else thinks the schedule is becoming to stagnant with all of the 1 1/2 tracks. They need more road courses.

The schedule's been filled with the mile-an-a-half's for 19 years now. Nothing's gonna change because neither SMI or ISC is willing to give up a date to another track (Road America or Montreal).

Unless Brian France will ok it, nothing's gonna change, except some date shuffling. I'm happy that Darlington is at least back where it belongs.


And Moo, I've gotta disagree about the current package being good. (it sure has helped that your team got it figured out right when the season started though.) It's even more aero-dependent than it was last year, and even in Charlotte drivers are nearly holding it wide open. :/

They really need to knock another 700 pounds of downforce to make up for the horsepower drop and they'll get what they were looking for in my opinion.

I was meaning more the total package Lightning, dates, venues, yes the car to some degree, but i also understand the issues concerning this generation of car. We live in a world now where we understand aero completely. Its not just NASCAR that has these issues, its all forms of motorsports, why was Dale Earnhardt so good on a SuperSpeedway, he knew back then what we all know now.

I dont think the cutting of the downforce is the answer, as we saw with the Trevor Bayne crash at Talladega, there is point where you take the air off the car in front on the back left hand corner and it just pulls the car around, granted that was on a SuperSpeedway, but you see it on the wider two miler circuits as well. Unfortunately the knowledge on aero now is just so good that the cars are on the very edge of control if a slight adjustment the wrong way happens, plus we all know that clean air is king and amongst even cars, overtaking is no easy task, unfortunately Charlotte is perhaps the worst track due to this and the worrying no overtakes for the lead on the final segment in the All Star race for the last five years proves it.

Its not just NASCAR suffering, its the majority of the high powered Touring Car series, V8 Supercars are trying to go down the tyre route to solve the issue, which saw James Courtney putting some wet tyres in a dry race on a few weeks back to save good tyres. The DTM has gone down the dreaded Push To Pass route, which does look good when the spoiler dips at the back of the car, but again, a series in which overtaking is just so hard these days. I guess on such an even playing field, its something we have to learn to deal with as the solution isnt a simple one and in the modern world of motor racing, the preparations by all the teams is on a different level. The days of Bill Elliott making up two laps at Talladega by himself and Dick Trickle having a cheeky cigarette under caution are long gone.

Good points. Although at least the v8's have been pretty entertaining this year and tonight's Charlotte race (I'm typing this with roughly 70 laps to go) have been pretty good. Maybe some more development on the package is what is needed after all. Maybe by Darlington we'll know what's going on.


...now if only there was a way to get WRC to go back to Group-A-syle rules again....

It's about time Truex and the 78 team got one. They might be the only team that can straight up go against the 4 & 48.

That was a hell of a good race at Sonoma! Well worth the time invested in watching it.