HEMBREE: Jeff Burton? On The Phone?

Sprint Cup

HEMBREE: Jeff Burton? On The Phone?

Bristol Motor Speedway changes will make August interesting…

Mike Hembree | Posted June 30, 2012 Sparta, KY

The Bristol Motor Speedway track surface will have a new look this weekend. (Photo: Bristol Motor Speedway)

Jeff Burton called me at home.

This doesn’t happen often, so I paid attention.

Turns out it wasn’t Jeff Live. It was Jeff Recorded – an automatic-send message to those on the Bristol Motor Speedway ticket list, assuring us that the revamped racing surface at the half-mile track is in fine shape to host a barnburner of a NASCAR weekend in late August.

Since a barely half-full house showed up to watch the track’s Sprint Cup race in March, Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman Bruton Smith and his minions have been busy with chainsaws and other fun-guy power equipment, hastily trying to turn the track into whatever it is that fans apparently want it to be.

That involved a nasty-looking grinding process, the basic goal of which was to make the track’s top groove so inhospitable and tricky that no one will even think of venturing there – not even guys selling programs in pre-race or the occasional Food City vice president.

The goal here is to create a landscape that will return BMS racing to its pre-2007 version. Then, the track was widened to encourage side-by-side racing, but the result has been what many fans describe as boring, despite the fact that most drivers, including – and particularly – Burton, praised the 2007 changes as producing much better racing at one of the Sprint Cup tour’s most popular tracks.

This spring’s modifications apparently will make the track’s top groove a no-man’s-land of sorts, attractive only to lapped cars, tire trash and assorted debris. The action, or so the public-relations machinery says, will be in the middle and low grooves, and the grappling for those spots on the newly tightened track will be of gigantic proportions.

Wrecks? They aren’t necessarily being advertised, but they’ll be back, too. In fact, the ferocity could be downright medieval, the thinking goes, just short of visions of those cable-TV gladiator shows in which skulls are crushed and blood spurts forth in gallons.

It remains to be seen, of course, how all this is going to work out. We’ll know Aug. 25, and it will be interesting to see how Smith’s decision to make another round of drastic changes to one of his bedrock tracks, once home to 55 straight sellouts, impacts ticket sales. Maybe it won’t be quite so lonely in the Darrell Waltrip Grandstand.

Meanwhile, Jeff, thanks for the call.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Hembree

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