NASCAR 101: The Curious Case of Texas Motor Speedway

If you’ve watched a NASCAR Cup Series race at Texas Motor Speedway lately and felt like something looked off, you weren’t imagining it. The cars run in a tight little ribbon down low. Half the track sits empty most of the day. Drivers complain. Fans complain. And every year or two, somebody floats the idea of tearing the whole thing up and starting over.

How did one of NASCAR’s signature 1.5-mile tracks get into this mess? The short answer is a 2017 renovation that tried to solve one problem and ended up creating about four more.

Texas Motor Speedway sits just north of Fort Worth. It opened in 1997, runs 1.5 miles around, and is what NASCAR calls an intermediate track, meaning that it’s bigger than a short track like Bristol Motor Speedway but smaller than a superspeedway like Daytona International Speedway. Most Cup races happen at tracks roughly this size, which is why what happens at Texas matters to the sport overall.

When the track opened, all four turns had the same banking — 24 degrees, which is fairly steep — and the racing surface was 60 ft. wide all the way around. For about 20 years, that produced the kind of fast, side-by-side racing fans expected from a modern intermediate track.

Then, the asphalt got old.

By 2016, the pavement at TMS was soaking up rainwater like a sponge. Eddie Gossage, who ran the track at the time, used that exact word to describe what they were dealing with. Even a passing shower could shut things down for hours. That year, the weather wrecked all three of the track’s big events: the NTT IndyCar Series race and both NASCAR weekends.

Something had to be done. In January 2017, Speedway Motorsports announced a full repave.

But that’s not actually what it did.

Instead of just laying down new asphalt, Speedway Motorsports decided to redesign half the track at the same time. Turns 1 and 2 got the full treatment. The banking was dropped from 24 degrees down to 20, and the racing surface was widened from 60 ft. to 80. It also installed a serious new drainage system beneath the straightaways.

Turns 3 and 4? They were left alone, with the same banking and the same width.

The thinking, more or less, was that flatter, wider corners would create more passing. Drivers would have to brake earlier, look for different lines and maybe try the high side. Steve Swift, the Speedway Motorsports executive who oversaw the project, said at the time that they were trying to figure out the best way to “create more exciting racing and to correct the water issues” all at once.

Here’s the thing about banking, though. It’s what holds the car onto the track in the corner. The steeper the banking, the more grip. Take banking away, and you take grip away. That’s just physics.

So, when you flatten one end of an oval and leave the other end alone, you don’t get a track with two interesting personalities. You get a track where one end works and the other end doesn’t, and drivers spend the whole race wrestling with the difference.

Worse still, the wider racing surface in turns 1 and 2 didn’t actually give drivers more room to race. They had more pavement, sure, but only a sliver of it had any grip. Cars piled up in a single groove down low because that was the only place anything worked.

The drivers noticed immediately. After his fourth race on the new layout, Chase Elliott didn’t hide how he felt.

“I don’t know what genius decided to pave this place or take the banking out of [turns] 1 and 2, but not a good move for the entertainment factor, in my opinion,” Elliott said in 2018.

Kyle Busch, who has more Cup wins at Texas than any other active driver, put it more diplomatically.

“There’s probably about 6 inches of that racetrack that feels really good,” Busch said. “And that’s the groove that you want to be in, and stay in, in order to get that grip.”

Faced with a single-groove track, the people at Texas tried to chemistry their way out of it. They started painting the upper part of the corner with a traction compound called PJ1. It’s basically a sticky resin that bonds to asphalt and gives tires something to grip when they roll over it.

For a while, it kind of worked. The 2019 race was actually pretty good. But over time, the compound stained the surface, wouldn’t fully come off and started behaving inconsistently. On a hot day, it might be grippy. On a cool one, it might be slick. Drivers started describing the upper groove as feeling like black ice, except you can’t always tell which version of the surface you’re dealing with until you’re already up there.

Then, there’s the bump. Somewhere in turns 3 and 4, where there’s a tunnel running underneath the track, the pavement developed a noticeable bump. It was always there, but in the Next Gen car NASCAR introduced in 2022, it got mean. If two cars try to run side by side through there, the one on the outside often bottoms out — meaning the chassis hits the pavement — and goes spinning into the wall. Crews tried grinding the bump down. It didn’t really fix it.

The cumulative damage has been real. Texas used to host two Cup races a year. Now it has one. Over 40,000 grandstand seats have been removed because the demand isn’t there. IndyCar, which had raced at Texas since opening day in 1997, packed up and left after 2023. Gossage stepped down, then passed away in 2024. Ticket sales hit lows the track hadn’t seen before.

It’s still on the schedule. The WÜRTH 400 tripleheader weekend runs May 1–3 this year. But the Texas of 2026 is a fundamentally different, and significantly diminished, version of the track that opened in ’97.

If there’s a takeaway here for someone learning about NASCAR, it’s that racetracks are weirdly fragile things. The relationship between banking, surface, width and tire compound is delicate enough that changing any one variable can cascade through the rest.

Texas tried to fix a drainage issue and got something more ambitious tacked onto the project. Two decades of solid racing got traded for something nobody seems to like, and the track has been chasing the fix ever since.

Whether the next move is another repave, a full redesign, or a conversion into something different entirely (the EchoPark Speedway route in Atlanta, for example, where it turned its intermediate into a quasi-superspeedway), remains an open question.

For now, Texas is what it is: a cautionary tale at 180 mph.