First, it wasn’t the Bristol Night Race everyone anticipated and then it became one that everyone was ready to quickly move on from.
This was not the spring race, one in which tires faded within 30 laps and then 70 by the end once teams responded to the moment, but it wasn’t even the race from the previous summer that produced a great deal of action and excitement either.
Ultimately, whatever happened in March is going to go down as one of NASCAR’s great mysteries but what happened on Saturday, everyone seems sure about.
“It’s too easy to drive,” said Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 crew chief Chris Gabehart. “They’re too close, and you’re not going to ask for much better racing. I’m sorry you’re not. The bottom was good. The middle was good. The top was good. But they’re all separated by 0.0-nothing. And physics is a buffer.
“You know, these are the world’s best Stock Car teams and drivers. If you don’t give them enough ways to separate themselves, this is what you’re going to see. So, I actually thought it was as good a race as you could hope for.
“Now I was, I was busy, so maybe that’s not a great objective opinion, maybe. Maybe I’d go back and watch it and get a different take. But the days of the old Bristol are over with this car. That’s just the truth.”
His driver, Denny Hamlin, echoed that sentiment.
“Running close to the same car, it’s on a short track and the tire doesn’t fall off, right,” Hamlin said. “It either doesn’t last 40 laps or it lass 200. We’ve got to get some consistency in the tires going but other than that, all these cars are equal, the drivers are equal and that’s why it’s so hard to pass.”
Even winner Kyle Larson, who dominated to the tune of 462 of 500 laps led and a seven second margin of victory struggled at numerous points of the race to put cars already laps down, another lap down. In this spec car era, everyone is that close.
Fans come to Bristol expecting a degree of attrition and chaos but this wasn’t that kind of track, even if it’s something the racers, like Christopher Bell, all said they appreciated.
“I thought it was really good race track,” Bell said. “By stage three, there was three-wide racing because you could still run the bottom, the middle came in and we had already worked in the top.”
The track had three lanes because of the last-minute decision NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports made, in apparent consultation with drivers, to spray PJ1 brand Trackbite on the bottom of the track just hours before green flag.
That decision was made for several reasons.
By practice, it had become apparent that Saturday night was not going to play out the way March had, and if nothing was done beyond the resin sprayed the day before, Cup cars would follow the direction of the Xfinity Series race the night before and run single-file right up against the wall.
Rodney Childers, crew chief of the Stewart-Haas No. 4, said in real-time that he understood why that decision was made.
“The one thing we have to remember, and we talk about this all the time, is we have to put on a good show for the fans,” Childers said. “If we don’t do that, we’re not filling these seats, so hopefully this puts on a good show for fans tonight.”
It just wasn’t the kind of show most fans expected.
Understand, that when fans say the tires didn’t wear, that simply wasn’t true. There was a second of fall off over the course of a run but it certainly wasn’t the inexplicable catastrophic failures managed by the field back in March.
But what happened in March wasn’t even ‘tire wear’ at its core.
Goodyear has been adamant that the tires made for this past weekend were made the same way as those made in March, and also those made in July for a summer test that shredded rubber in the same manner.
Stewart-Haas Racing crew chief Drew Blickensderfer expected a repeat of the March after one of their cars attended that test.
“The tire tests they did here with 14 car, it was just like March, you know,” Blickensderfer said. “50 laps, maybe before you had cords on both right sides so we came here, expecting that and lo and behold, we had 45 minutes practice and for 40 minutes of it, people were running the top and we ran 70 straight laps with no issues.
“We could go 120 laps with no issues. Not sure what is completely different, but it’s not what … everybody expected.”
JTG Daugherty Racing No. 47 crew chief Mike Kelley struggles to accept that they’re the same tires.
“That spring race is going to go down as one of the great asterisks,” Kelley said. “It’s such an oddity. They tell us the tires are the same and I guess, if they tell me that enough, I’ll start to believe them. I’m not saying I don’t but there just had to be something different that night.
“They tested it in cold weather and got the same thing. They tested it in hot weather and got the same thing. They wore tires out big time in the summer test. We live in this databased world and we all spend a lot of money on really smart people and so many of them have no idea how to explain what happened that night.”
Childers is still convinced something happened during the manufacturing of the tires used in March.
“I don’t know if they changed the tiniest little thing in the tire and didn’t tell us but that’s sometimes how it works,” Childers said.
Interim Richard Childress Racing competition director Keith Rodden shared a similar viewpoint.
“There has to be something they can trace, the base materials that go into the tires,” Rodden said. “It was really hot at the test in July and they had the same issues. Then they put down some PJ1 and it got more life out of the tires.
“To come here this weekend and not have a single issue, it’s a real mystery.”
Maybe the addition of ARCA and Xfinity in addition to Trucks and Cup fundamentally changed the track from March and July, too.
Cliff Daniels, who won the race with Larson, said the surprise factor is ultimately something Goodyear and NASCAR will not be able to recreate.
“I think it would be very hard to recreate the spring again because of the element of surprise,” Daniels said. “I do think it’s a real thing at the concrete tracks.
“A lot of folks may not remember, there was a practice at Dover a year or two ago where it was a really cool day, and the race tire at Dover that weekend really looked like what the Bristol tire looked like in the spring.
“It was really powdery, dusty, to the cords right away, and that race weekend in Dover the sun came out on Sunday and the track took rubber and kind of fixed everything.
“I think a lot of that is what’s at play here. Everyone is certainly going to have their opinion on what you want to see, but I just find it hard to think that we could sustain or recreate the environment of what happened in the spring.”
Daniels concedes he’s biased but he thought the racing was really compelling on Saturday night, even if it wasn’t the show everyone expected or wanted.
“From my seat, yes, we led a lot of laps today, but there was a lot of good, hard racing today,” Daniels said. “A lot of side-by-side battles. You had multiple lanes working.
“I don’t know but that makes for a really good race in my opinion, from a racer’s standpoint. I’m okay with the way it was today. Less chaos.”