Author:
Rick
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Date Posted: Monday, March 08, 05:57:45pm
Here is the note I sent to Jeff Byrd:
Now that, for the first time in my memory, tickets are available for the spring race at Bristol, will you guys admit that you screwed up?
I understand why you did what you did to that track. You made the racing 'better.' Fewer wrecks, fewer cautions, fewer torn up cars, less money out of the owners' pockets. Better racing. But that isn't what made Bristol Bristol. People don't go to Bristol for 'better' racing. They line up and pay scalpers prices for 'EXCITING' racing.
Because of what you were going to do, some friends and I made a decision. I live in Nova Scotia. Another friend lives in Iowa, another in Detroit and a fourth in Colorado. Three of us flew in to Detroit, rented a motorhome and drove to Bristol. We got to see the last great race at your track. Unfortunately we got to see Kyle Busch take a jack hammer to the track afterwards.
Now that Bristol is no longer a guaranteed sell out, I have three questions for you:
1: When will you admit you were wrong?
2: Can you put it back to the way it was?
3: Will you?
I have one more question.... the idiot who decided to destroy Bristol... does he still have a job?
I look forward to hearing from you,
Rick Dupuis
here is the reply I just got:
Hello Rick,
I’m going to answer on Jeff Byrd’s behalf because he is taking an unexpected medical leave that’s going to cause him to miss the first major event in his 14-year history with the Speedway.
To answer your questions, first we must tell you why the track had to be resurfaced at all, and that requires a little history.
The track was built in 1960, much flatter, and then banked about six years later to the base configuration in place today. The asphalt surface served pretty well until Goodyear and Hoosier started battling it out on the high banks, and the increased grip, compounded by the advanced downforce, pulled the rocks right out of the asphalt and sprayed the outside retaining walls with aggregate.
So, in 1992, then-track-owner Larry Carrier put down the first all-concrete surface for NASCAR (at that time) Winston Cup cars. Since then, Dover, Nashville and I think Iowa have joined the all-concrete group, and of course there’s Martinsville, who paved with concrete through the corners before any of the rest of these tracks.
When the 1992 concrete was applied, it was done with very little technology: two-by-fours, strings and not much else. After the pour, the concrete surface was so rough, the drivers couldn’t drive on it. But taking out the concrete and starting over was not considered an option. So, Carrier, who had this kind of experience in drag racing, brought in grinders and grinded the bumps out of the track.
Downside of that is that the surface was very, very thin in some spots.
Add to the post-tension steel structure holding the surface together, there was a lot of stress on that concrete.
There’s a lot of geology in this area. Caves, rock formations, fill, Appalachian erosion, and over time, the entire concrete track pulled away from the outside retaining walls. I once found a large size high-top sneaker between the track surface and the outside retaining wall. I mean, the gap was big, and indicated that the track was moving.
Over the years, and we chose to keep this our dirty little secret, steel cables snapped chunks of concrete out of the surface on hot days. There were years when our operations guys cooled the track in the summer by running water over the surface to preserve it as best as possible.
Every event, spring and summer, we held our collective breath hoping not to have an embarrassing track failure. You may have seen an embarrassing track failure recently at the Daytona 500. That was our nightmare, but fortunately, it never happened to us.
Eventually, an all-new track had to be addressed. And putting it back like it was was not an option. It would have been next to impossible to recreate that surface.
There are a lot of factors affecting ticket demand right now, and yes, we will admit that some of our fans are more “wreck fans” than race fans.
We are making an adjustment this year by adding SAFER barriers to take away some of the racing room that was added when the re-do took place, and we will monitor this and make further adjustments as needed.
But there are some flaws in the logic that the race track is messed up. We run a lot of events here, and there’s a lot of action here. We all did handstands when the first Nationwide Series race ran on the new track because it was phenomenal.
I expect a great race to break out here, just like always happened on the old track. There are a lot of factors that make that happen. Earnhardt and Labonte duplicated their big finishes in 1995 and 1999. What do you remember about the races between?
Don’t give up on us. I’d rather see a race here than anywhere.
Wayne Estes, Bristol Motor Speedway
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