With the race craft lacking last weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway, some fans are left without knowing what to think about one of NASCAR’s most historic venues.
The Food City 500 made for a poor show, with a vast portion of the fanbase yet again displeased with the fact that the NASCAR Cup Series’ Next Gen Car seemingly can’t put on a good show in “Thunder Valley.”
In the 2024 spring race, tires blew left and right, resulting in a massive amount of cautions. In the fall race, tires seemingly never fell off. Last weekend, the latter prevailed and Kyle Larson sailed to an easy victory. With NASCAR sticking to its guns on the Next Gen platform, is it time to think about giving one of Bristol’s dates to another track?
The Truth Hurts: Bristol Is A Victim Of Circumstance
Fans have long called Bristol “The Last Great Colosseum,” and for this purpose I think the name fits all too well. To know why, though, we must first learn a bit of history.
In the year 1349, the Roman Colosseum’s south side collapsed due to a major earthquake. You’ve seen it in the movies, right? It was (and still is) a massive structure, beloved by all of the civilized world for the first-class events that could only be housed within its circled walls.
The kicker here, though, is that if you’re a history buff you’ll know that Western Rome fell in 476, nearly 1,000 years earlier. The Colosseum had been in decline for quite some time. Builders would scavenge it for materials in order to erect churches, palaces and hospitals, and when it truly collapsed on that day in 1349, it was a shell of its former self. While it was still a monumental structure revered by all around, the townspeople had let it grow frail and insignificant in their day-to-day life.
Sound familiar?
It should.
Although it hasn’t taken hundreds of years, Bristol itself is now a shell of what it once was. The racing that took place there during the golden era of NASCAR was second to none and earned the track its spot in the “crown jewel” category of venues in the sport.
Those times have passed, though. The empire that those great drivers built has fallen, and it’s time to do as the Byzantines did – build another.
There are those that will say that a track should not be punished for NASCAR’s equipment or vehicles not being suited for racing there, and if it were as easy as bringing a different car to the race track, I might agree with them. However, that is not the reality. At this point, nobody truthfully believes that NASCAR plans to make any monumental changes to its cars — and they shouldn’t. From a dollars and cents perspective (this is a business after all), it’s just about the least economically responsible decision the sport could make.
So, the cars aren’t changing, which is part of the problem. That’s not all of it, though. As someone who was there for Sunday’s Cup race, I expected a fairly packed house. Those who saw the race, though, will tell you that the crowd was far from packed and this serves as another reminder that it might be time to reevaluate the economics of having two races a season at Bristol. By no means is this the fault of the track, either. It’s just a victim of circumstance.
With room for over 150,000 people, the track is just what its nickname implies: a colosseum. That is to say, a monument to days gone by. It’s one of the largest stadiums in the world. It’s fair to say that it’s even an engineering marvel, and it deserves to be treated as such. It’s impressive to look at, no doubt.
However, if you follow any other major sports, you’ll know that venues are getting smaller and smaller with each new rendition. The Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, holds just 18,000 people, compared to the home of the Bulls, which holds nearly 21,000. Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders, only holds 65,000, compared to the much older Lambeau Field, which holds more than 80,000. Venues are getting smaller in order to lessen overhead costs and relieve the pressure that televised sports brings in, and NASCAR has long needed to do the same, or else they’ll be left in the same place as the Romans – the past.
If there is one event to take away, it’s the spring race at Bristol. The night race deserves its moment in the sun to a) honor those who have come before us and b) keep up with one of the best traditions the sport has to offer. That would allow fans, especially newer ones, to revel in the spectacle of Bristol, even if the racing itself is ugly. Because everything that’s ugly looks better in the dark, doesn’t it?
There are other tracks where this car works better that deserve that other race, if for nothing else than the fact they put on a good show. Take your pick out of those tracks, or swap them around if you like, but please, don’t make fans sit through a three-hour-long locomotive festival more than you have to, NASCAR. – Tanner Marlar
Bristol Has a Car Problem and Shouldn’t Be Punished For it
Yes, Sunday’s race was bad. So was the night race in the fall.
Still, Bristol doesn’t need to lose a date.
Seriously, the argument that Bristol needs to be punished for the racing we’ve seen in the Next Gen era is one of the laziest the sport’s fanbase has ever come up with. NASCAR built a terrible race car for short tracks, and because of that, the tracks should be punished? How on earth is that fair?
First and foremost, let’s get the facts straight, especially for those who want to talk about attendance. For those that don’t know, Bristol Motor Speedway has a seating capacity of 146,000 people, good enough for third-most behind only Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Daytona International Speedway on the NASCAR schedule. Cut that number in half, and it still seats more people at half capacity than 12 of the other 23 tracks on the Cup Series schedule (Not including Chicago, which doesn’t have a fixed capacity).
So to say people aren’t attending the race because the stands look half-full in the spring would be disingenuous, because that same “sellout crowd” we get at places like Darlington Raceway is still 15-to-20,000 less people than a 50% crowd at Bristol.
Plus, we continue to run this race in late March to early April, when the weather sucks in Eastern Tennessee, and the night race is always packed (take it from a guy who goes every year), so the so-called attendance issue doesn’t exist.
Now to the racing.
The style of racing we see at Bristol has certainly evolved over the years, whether that was due to track changes or the car, but we rarely ever saw a bad Bristol race until the Next Gen era. Yeah, sometimes we’d see dominant performances, but the track always raced well, especially to the fans who really appreciate good short-track racing.
From 2013-2021 (the Gen 6 era), Bristol races averaged 18.5 lead changes per race, while seeing an average of 9.2 natural cautions (excluding stages). The cars could run closer together, make passes on one another and were harder to drive.
With the beginning of the Next Gen era in 2022, those numbers saw a drastic drop, excluding the 2024 Spring race, featuring the unorthodox tire situation that we can all agree is the outlier here. The other four races averaged out at 8.5 lead changes per race and 4.3 natural cautions, with both numbers gradually declining as the Next Gen era continued.
So I’ll ask again, why should Bristol be punished, rather than NASCAR fixing the problem they created?
The topic of bringing the dirt back to Bristol is an entirely different animal, one that there isn’t time for in this discussion. There are plenty of dirt tracks in America that are in untapped markets and would put on better races, but if that’s what it takes to compromise, then fine.
We just can’t sit here and point fingers at Bristol, when Martinsville Speedway and Darlington Raceway have shown us similar issues and nobody batted an eye at those tracks.
Bristol has a car problem, not a track problem, and shouldn’t face repercussions because of it. – Chase Folsom
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.