A little under 10 years ago, NASCAR couldn’t get enough of road courses. That might not be the case anymore.
For roughly 30 years, the NASCAR Cup Series only had two road courses on the schedule: Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen International. When the 2010s came around, the road courses were putting on some of the best racing on the tour, yet there were still only two times all year that action was on display.
Meanwhile, the schedule was overbooked with mile-and-a-half tracks, or the cookie cutters as the fans called them, where the racing left much to be desired. This led to some fans begging and pleading for a greater variety of tracks on the schedule, using the hashtags #MoreShortTracks and #MoreRoadCourses.
With NASCAR locked into long contracts with its current tracks, moves were made to appease the fans without changing up the host facilities. Charlotte Motor Speedway led the charge by introducing its ROVAL as a replacement for its traditional fall date in 2018. The ROVAL was a huge success, and it led Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Daytona International Speedway to follow suit.
As those contracts finally ended as the 2020s started, NASCAR began to add road courses that weren’t just the infields of other tracks it used. Circuit of the Americas and Road America were added, bumping the road course total up to seven points races in 2021. In the time since then, the Chicago street course was introduced, and Cup is going to Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez for the first time later this year.
But in the time since 2021, it seems fans have developed road course fatigue. This was not helped by the introduction of the Next Gen car, which races phenomenally on the cookie cutters but has put on some bore-fests at road courses. The Daytona road course and Road America were not brought back after a few years on the schedule, and Indianapolis moved its lone date back to the oval last year.
There were also rumblings last year that Charlotte’s fall date would move from the ROVAL back to the oval, but ultimately, no change was made. Some believe that it should have, though, as the Charlotte oval has become one of the most entertaining tracks on the circuit and the ROVAL has fallen off its initial hype.
This year is the last of NASCAR’s three-year deal with the city of Chicago, so that street race could be going away. Then again, it could re-up with the city or hold a street race in a different location, as that event has stayed relatively popular.
Regardless, the fans finally got what they wanted at the start of this decade. But through oversaturation and not-great road-course racing in recent years, it seems it’s time to switch up the hashtag to #LessRoadCourses.
There are currently six road courses on the schedule, but in a perfect world, there should only be four: Watkins Glen, a street race in the U.S., an international race and a yearly rotation of existing road courses.
Watkins Glen is a staple on the schedule and is considered to be the superspeedway of road courses and has some of the best crowds in all of NASCAR, so it must be on the schedule every year. A street race can continue to draw in new fans and create NASCAR buzz like Chicago has done in recent years. The same goes for an international race. A rotating existing course could showcase some of the best road courses in the country while also keeping them all fresh.
But we don’t live in a perfect world.
Watkins Glen is owned by NASCAR and Sonoma by Speedway Motorsports, so those two will not leave the schedule anytime soon. That’s good for one part of my plan but bad for another. Having another street race and international race seem feasible and part of NASCAR’s vision, so those are good things as well.
The problem is I can’t ever see NASCAR rotating between road courses. It has yet to be able to swing a rotation of the championship race among tracks it owns and already has on the schedule. How could a rotation among tracks it doesn’t own and doesn’t have on the schedule possibly work?
Assuming Charlotte’s ROVAL eventually goes back to the oval, that leaves Cup with five road courses: Watkins Glen, a street race, an international race, Sonoma and COTA. The latter two have become quite boring in recent years. Maybe the COTA date goes to another road course, but it’d probably be somewhere that gets locked in for three years, and it’d probably put on boring racing, as has been the case with most Next Gen road courses.
Of course, none of this matters if the Next Gen starts putting on thrillers at road courses. That might even swing the pendulum back to #MoreRoadCourses again. With this car, even Watkins Glen has put on a few bores (excluding last year).
Either the tires need to get way softer or there needs to be tire options with two dynamically different tires, similar to what Formula 1 does. What would really make the racing better at road courses is if the cars didn’t have such great braking and turn ability, making it much more complicated to get around the turns. That’s why the road course racing of yesteryear was so exciting: Drivers would give it their all to get that big, heavy stock car around courses unnatural to it. The Next Gen car is similar to those of IMSA, though, and it gets around road courses too well.
But changes to the brakes, suspensions, etc., would requite a complete overhaul of the car, and that simply isn’t happening. The teams would probably riot.
Shortening the layout of COTA for this upcoming weekend was a good move, as it will hopefully force the cars to be right on top of each other as opposed to the spread-out races that have been taking place there. But that’s just a Band-Aid, as is the case with changes to the tires mentioned earlier.
The reality is that until changes are made to the car, road course racing isn’t going to be as exciting as it used to be. But the good news for NASCAR is that it’s putting on fantastic racing at intermediate tracks right now, so it should really lean into those track types for the time being.
So for now, #LessRoadCourses and #MoreIntermediates.
Michael Massie joined Frontstretch in 2017 and has served as the Content Director since 2020.
Massie, a Richmond, Va., native, has covered NASCAR, IndyCar, SRX and the CARS Tour. Outside of motorsports, the Virginia Tech grad and Green Bay Packers minority owner can be seen cheering on his beloved Hokies and Packers.