Rain Forces Postponement of Food City 500 to Monday

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor

As expected for much of the week leading up to Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol, the rains that were forecasted for race day came with full force, drenching the half-mile bullring and postponing the race until Monday.

The 40 car Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series field will now get ready to race at 1:00 PM ET on Monday afternoon, with the race being shown on FOX and broadcast on PRN/SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

“It’s Mother Nature and we saw it coming on the radar for probably a week.  We all thought we’d be racing on Monday and that’s just part of it,” said Kurt Busch.

With the rain, the question now will be how the VHT substance that the track officials laid down in the lower groove will react once the field does go green.

“The rain is somewhat of a blessing in disguise you could say because the track was talking about laying down more VHT and they can’t do it while it’s wet,” said Busch. “The VHT is like a grip applicator and you have to heat it up to make it work, so in the drag racing world the guys do a burnout through it and you have that stripe that you just heat it up and that’s what has to happen for us oval guys.  We have to have more cars out there to heat it up, so it’s gonna be like ice when we first start off and then the grip will come back once we do heat it up after this rain delay.”

“I’m hopeful that once we burn through some of that top surface, and we get through to where we’re starting to wear it away, then the outside groove will come into play.  We didn’t see super-long runs yesterday in the XFINITY race and that’s where our cars when we get into those big, long runs we’ll groom in that outside groove.  Hopefully, you’ll have a bottom and a top once it gets down to it.”

Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott will lead the field to green on Monday, followed by Martin Truex, Jr., Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Kyle Busch, Jamie McMurray, Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick to round out the top-10 starters.