CUP: Drivers Have Texas-Sized Struggle

Sprint Cup

CUP: Drivers Have Texas-Sized Struggle

Texas Motor Speedway has its own unique personality...

Tom Jensen | Posted November 03, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Texas Motor Speedway hosts two annual NASCAR Sprint Cup races. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Joey Logano minces no words about Texas Motor Speedway and the challenges it will present to drivers during Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup race.

“People like to call these 1.5-mile tracks ‘cookie-cutter’ tracks, but I assure you they all drive completely differently,” said Logano, pilot of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. “I run really well at Charlotte, but struggle at Atlanta and Texas. If we can get a solid finish this weekend that would be huge for this team to check another one of the tracks I’ve struggled at off the list.”

At the ripe age of 20 and just wrapping his second year in NASCAR’s top division, it’s understandable that Logano is still learning to come to grips with the lightning-fast, 1.5-mile Texas track. He’s not alone, though: Plenty of top drivers wrestle with the track at Texas.

“Texas is a very difficult race track,” said Jeff Burton, driver of the No. 31 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet. “It's really, really fast. The corner entries are completely different than anywhere else. It's almost a poor design the way the track is, but that's okay.”

Although TMS looks very similar to its sister mile-and-a-half tracks in Charlotte, Atlanta and Las Vegas, in truth it is very, very unique. And if you listen to former IndyCar racer Tony Stewart, it’s that way on purpose.

“The entry and exit of these corners, they're very abrupt as far as the banking,” said Stewart, who won an IndyCar championship in 1997 before moving to NASCAR. “When you turn in the corner, very abrupt getting in, and falls off very quickly. The reason for that, when they built Texas Motor Speedway, they intended to have the Indy Cars race on the apron. That's why the apron is so wide at Texas. The Indy Cars were not originally meant to run on the banking. That's why the banking on the entry of the corner and exit falls off so fast so the cars could come from the straightaway from the apron and back up with a smooth transition from the bottom.”

While that explains why TMS is laid out the way it is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Far from it.

“It makes it a different challenge than what we have at Charlotte or Atlanta because of that,” said Stewart, co-owner/driver of the No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet. “It does make it a lot more challenging to get your car set up for it. You can't relax on the entry and you can't relax on the exit of the corner. That banking, a lot of times your car — it's hard to get your car secure on the entry because you don't have that banking to hold it. It definitely falls out from under you. When it does, you have to make sure your car is tight enough to make it through that transition.”

“It's a tough 1.5-mile race track because the transitions from straightaways to the corners and corners to straightaways are very challenging and abrupt,” said Jeff Gordon, who has one victory in 19 Texas starts, all in his No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “So it's hard to get the car comfortable in those sections. And if you get comfortable in those sections in and off the corner, how do you get the car to turn in the middle? You're doing all those things at a 170 or 180 miles per hour, so it’s a very challenging race track. It's been one of the most challenging for me and my race team over the years for that reason.”

Texas Motor Speedway was added to the NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule in 1997. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

And with a track qualifying record of 196.235 miles per hour set by Brian Vickers four years ago, TMS trails only Atlanta in terms of being the fastest non-restrictor-plate track in NASCAR. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.

“I love the speed,” said Ryan Newman, driver of the No. 39 SHR Chevy. “It’s a fast race track. The weather should be cool so hopefully we can haul the mail.”

Still, there are no guarantees.

“The hard part is, even if you were the guy that won the Texas race in the spring, it's such a long gap between the spring and fall race that you got to keep in mind our sport is a technology-driven sport,” said Stewart. “Guys make their programs better. Shock programs change. Setups change. The conditions that you have temperature-wise can be different. Just because you were good there before, just because you were good in Atlanta, doesn't guarantee you'll be good at Texas the second time around.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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Tom Jensen

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