Bristol Motor Speedway has been all the rage across NASCAR after one of the best weekends in the sport’s recent history. Fans were treated to a first-time truck winner, a battle for the regular-season championship decided while wrecking across the finish line, and two Cup Series champions going at it as the season-favorite posted his sixth victory.
Some say the magic and intensity never left, but we should be saying it’s been restored at ‘The Last Great Colosseum.’ Instead of pointing fingers at NASCAR for covering Bristol in dirt for the Spring race, maybe praises should be sung in their honor for only hosting one true race in Thunder Valley.
Whether you want to call it a mission by teams to prove why NASCAR shouldn’t cover the beloved track in dirt for one weekend or just happenstance that we shouldn’t have taken what we had for granted — all signs point to it being positive that the sanctioning body only hosts one race at Bristol for the time being.
Let’s not kid ourselves; there’s been an obvious competitive gap between Bristol’s Spring and Fall races. In recent years, we’ve seen an abundance of green-flag racing at the half mile with very little parity up front. Sure, the intensity never wavered, but the on-track product failed to follow up what was on display in Thunder Valley earlier in the year, and it ended up being stale.
While there were undoubtedly dominant cars between all three national series at Bristol last weekend, you can’t deny the emphasized hunger throughout the field, which led to a weekend of unpredictability. Each winner put together a rally within the closing five laps for their respective race and the only victor who led the most laps throughout the night was Kyle Larson, and even that win came surprisingly.
The Bristol night race has always been highly regarded by fans and competitors, who popularly consider it an unspoken crown jewel event. In addition to this weekend being the debut of the paved track in 2021 under the lights, it also served as a playoff elimination race, which added another element of significance to the weekend.
With so much on the line, it felt like NASCAR let 40 or so caged beasts run free to assert themselves as the apex predator atop the food chain between all three races at Bristol.
As much as it will pain people to hear, we need to give Bristol dirt a chance. It wasn’t given a fair shot with weather preventing the qualifying heats from taking place, thus inadvertently causing dust to dampen the main event on Sunday.
If the dirt event flops in 2022, they’d have to go back to the paved oval in the Spring. There can’t be one sole oval race if there isn’t another event held at Bristol. Period.
Ultimately, Bristol is what NASCAR is all about. It’s what the fans and competitors want to see, as it encompasses the history and competitive fire of the sport. People will show up in droves to the .533-mile track, whether it’s covered in dirt or not.
The point is, maybe having one paved race at Bristol merits more value to the already monumental event. Sometimes too much of a good thing tarnishes its worth.
