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Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | 1:20 p.m.
If you owned a Rolex watch, you would probably treat it with kid gloves. You’d protect it, preserve it and you certainly wouldn’t replace its Swiss time-keeping mechanism with the workings of a $15 watch from Walmart.
That’s how I feel about Bristol Motor Speedway. It was a thing of beauty with character and a reputation that made it famous. So why change it?
Bristol was resurfaced in 2007 to become wider and to add an additional racing groove. This ended the aggressive and physical bumper-to-bumper racing that drivers disliked but fans loved. Now drivers can pass with greater ease without having to use their front bumpers to nudge a slower car out of the way. As a result, the drama, emotion and unpredictability that used to define the racing at this track are largely gone.
1999 Bristol night race
The racing at Bristol is still good and I still enjoy watching it. But it used to be a track where, more than most tracks, you saw how each driver had to be a warrior to survive 500 laps on the high banks. Now Bristol is just too polite.
So is this why we saw so many empty seats on Sunday’s race? It could be one of many factors that have turned the most sought after ticket in motorsports into an event that can’t fill the grandstands. But it’s also logical that many things are at play here. The recession, gas prices and maybe the week off before the Bristol race all contributed to so many fans staying home.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder how many fans would have been in the stands if the old racing surface were still being used.
The Show has changed so much since 1999. Men were men, stock cars were (closer to being) stock cars. Tracks were creaky and worn, much like the drivers. Then Dale left us and 9/11 happened and two wars (now three?) and the COT.
But the big TV deal brought in so much money (and boogity); tracks were cleaned up or replaced (bye, bye Darlington, hello Fontana) with shiny temples of speed near major TV markets. Besides the repaving, Bristol added thousands of seats, as if Na$car's audience would grow by 8-10% a year forever. Ticket prices, t-shirt prices, even Bud prices were set for the Rolex crowd's wallet. Salty drivers were replaced with kids with bright smiles who learned to race at go-cart tracks, not dirt tracks. Then the financial crisis and a lot of unemployment of people who wear Walmart watches. And then Danica. The slide continues.
But the real reason attendance is sharply down at Bristol is that the Busch Brothers have won every race there for the past half decade. Unpredictability in Victory Lane hasn't been part of Bristol for quite a while.