NASCAR insiders evaluate reasons why Bristol Night race was a ‘disappointment’
Two NASCAR insiders discussed why Saturday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway didn’t meet expectations. On The Teardown podcast, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic talked about why the playoff race was a ‘disappointment.’
“They were going to have to pit for gas. Tires were not ever a thing, so you had that element of it in terms of the disappointment level. ,” Gluck said. “…But still it’s an elimination race, there’s still things that can happen. And then you start to realize ‘Oh, they can’t really pass.’ Martin Truex Jr. was running second, he was gonna have a top-three car, got a speeding penalty, restarts 24th, finishes 24th.
“…Where I want to see is NASCAR just cannot settle for this as the short-track product. This cannot be what is acceptable in any way. …The history of NASCAR short-tack racing is way too rich and way too meaningful to the sport to just go ‘Ah, this car just doesn’t race that well there. Everybody’s tried to say ‘But maybe the tires will be the thing.’ If you can’t figure out what you even did to tires in the first place. I don’t know what you do, I don’t know how you fix this, I don’t know that anybody does but wherever it lands this just can’t be the thing.
How tire wear could have impacted the NASCAR Bristol race
Bianchi also said that tires were an issue at Bristol. “If you’re going to make the racing better on short tracks, it comes down to tires, it comes down to tire wear,” he said. “We saw it here in the spring, we saw it in the first 30 laps at Richmond, we’ve seen it other times where there’s tire wear and drivers are having to manage a little bit because in this Next Gen era and everybody’s in this tight box and there’s very little speed differential between the big teams and the small teams as so hard to pass.
“The one thing you can control is tire wear. If you have tire wear, that’s going to create more of a speed differential that you need to set up passing. Then, you have situations like tonight if you had tire wear, Martin Truex Jr. would have had to made a choice of ‘Listen, I need to charge to the front, and I’m going to burn up my tires. But I need to get my track position back. That’s a choice I’m going to make because I have to. But I also may pay the price in the long run because I may end up not having tires and then I’m going to be sliding back and people are to be passing me.’”
Kyle Larson won the Bristol night race, leading 462 of the 500 laps. The race was the final one of the Round of 12 of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, leading to Truex, Ty Gibbs, Brad Keselowski and Harrison Burton being eliminated.
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