Bristol Motor Speedway shouldn’t exist.
Don’t read that the wrong way. I’m not saying Bristol Motor Speedway should cease to exist. I’m not one of those poor people trying to keep the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway from putting on a good time.
What I mean is this: The fact Bristol in its current form exists at all is mind-boggling.
If you’ve never paid a visit to Thunder Valley, let me try to explain what it’s like to lay your eyes on it for the first time.
My job covering NASCAR resulted in my first visit to Bristol in 2017, three years into my tenure at NBC Sports. Driving down the highway through the mountains of East Tennessee, you’d have no idea it was there if you were looking for it.
Once you make it to Bristol itself, from what I can remember it’s largely Small Town America. Lots of mom-and-pop stores, restaurants and one weirdly specific store that sold doors. Just doors.
All of a sudden, you round a bend. Boom. It’s just … there. It’s as if a giant hand had emerged from the ether in the middle of the night and dropped the track right on the edge of the mountains as a goof on the local populace.
“Wait until they get a load of this!”
Nothing can prepare you for the abrupt way Bristol Motor Speedway enters your life. I really envy the people with no knowledge of NASCAR who find themselves traveling through the area. Imaging you’re minding your own business, moseying along when you look to your right to find the bottom half of a giant spaceship, just minding its own business.
Bristol isn’t alone in this. So many tracks are just simply there, oddities dotting the landscape of America.
Take Michigan International Speedway, located in the Irish Hills of the Great Lake State.
My only trip so far to the 2-mile speedway was in 2022. Despite having watched NASCAR for decades, I didn’t really have a grasp of what the surrounding area of Brooklyn, Mich., was like.
Once you get off the highway, there’s not much. Fields. Lots of green fields.
Then you start driving. Then you drive some more. A little more. Look to your left.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” says Michigan International Speedway.
Somehow, someway, one of the most famous tracks in the country is just hanging out in the middle of nowhere Michigan.
Well, not exactly nowhere. On the other side of the track, off beyond turns 3 and 4, is Brooklyn. A typical small town in America that goes to sleep by 9 p.m.
But my favorite track that sneaks up on you is located a few states to the west of Michigan.
When you’re driving down highway in the middle of Wisconsin, there’s nothing that tells you a world class racing facility calls Elkhart Lake, Wis., home.
I mean, there’s literally nothing. In July 2022, at no point in my drive north from Milwaukee did I see any indication that Road America was out there, somewhere on the horizon.
No signs, no billboards and no banners. I was baffled.
Then came time to actually to the track. Whichever GPS app I was using, it had me thinking I had input the wrong address.
I hadn’t. For some reason it had sent me to Road America’s back door. Instead of the track’s very nice front entrance, I wound up at either gate 4 or 5, which just appeared out of thin air in the underbrush.
Then you actually enter the facility. RVs and tents are everywhere.
You’re not at a racetrack. You’ve arrived at a state park that happens to have a race track.
If any track can be described as being like a secret country club, it’s Road America.
But like Bristol, it shouldn’t exist.
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.