NASCAR’s smallest track, Martinsville Speedway, will soon receive a welcomed facelift and reconfiguration.
Following last Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500 (Oct. 30), track officials and top level NASCAR executives embarked upon exhaustive research, including but not limited to, reading internet blogs, listening to satellite radio shows and actually talking to a couple of rednecks, and have finalized a well thought out plan to fix perceived problems.
In case you have been living under a rock the last couple of days, the problem stems from the number of cautions that occurred during last Sunday’s race … 18 for 108 laps. Clearly, over one fifth of the race was run under the auspices of the yellow flag. Many fans and most importantly, supremely intelligence NASCAR internet writers, have been up in arms and clearly upset with the number of cautions on the half-mile raceway.
Fortunately, track and NASCAR officials have past experience to draw from when dealing with such a dilemma, in the form of the Series’ second-shortest track, the Bristol Motor Speedway.
As has been well documented, BMS had traditionally suffered from a similar problem whenever the cars came to race on the high-banked oval. As with Martinsville, there had always only been one racing lane at Bristol and that was the low, or inside lane. If for some reason you were shuffled to the outside well, you might as well have stuck a fork in yourself ‘cause, man, you were toast!
The solution was of course, graduated banking, which BMS installed just a few short years ago. Now at Bristol, there are actually three racing lanes and the competitors can actually RACE one another. That is exactly the solution to be installed at Martinsville.
Currently the hairpin corners at Martinsville are banked at a relatively flat 12 degrees, but that will soon change. BSNews has learned that, like BMS, Martinsville will also enjoy graduated banking for the 2012 season and beyond. While the inside lane will remain at 12 degrees, the rest of the corners will gradually increase to an almost dizzying 15 degrees!
“This will hopefully provide a full three lanes of actual racing in the corners and make all our fans who have ever had to suffer from 18 cautions very, very happy,” said one unidentified NASCAR official. “Our goal is, as always, making the fan’s happiness our number one priority.”
BREAKING NEWS……
Catawba County Sheriff Deputies have discovered hundreds of thousands of stolen NASCAR fans on the property of Jeremy Mayfield.
The fans and their loyalties were apparently stolen from NASCAR by Mayfield and were being sold to other sports to support Mayfield’s meth habit, according to sources close to the case.
A statement from NASCAR simply said that Brian France was pleased that the case of the missing fans had been solved and asked that they be returned to NASCAR as soon as they are no longer held as evidence in the case. Authorities had no real time frame for their return but seemed optimistic that it would be in time for the start of the 2012 season.
BSNews! Your first thought is our first name!
Stay off the wall,
Jeff Meyer
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