Speedway Motorsports Inc. Tag

By David Morgan, Associate Editor After Atlanta Motor Speedway announced earlier this week that it would be repaving and reconfiguring the 1.54-mile track for the 2022 season, a chorus of drivers and crew chiefs have come out in opposition to the changes planned to the oldest racing surface in NASCAR. Following his 102nd NASCAR Xfinity Series win Saturday at the track, you can add Kyle Busch to that growing list. “I sure am glad to win the final Xfinity Series race on a real Atlanta race track,” Busch said. “Because theRead More

By Luis Torres, Staff Writer Motorsports Christmas shouldn’t be taken away from the fans, who have a day to celebrate their favorite sport. There’s an outlandish statement Ken Willis from The Daytona Beach News-Journal made about the Indianapolis 500 should be moved to Saturday and the Coca-Cola 600 staying on Sunday or even moved to Memorial Day. It’s a joke and who can blame the people who feel this way. I understand the earlier days of the Indy 500 had the “Never on Sunday” rule, but we’re beyond past thoseRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service CONCORD, N.C. – Get ready for a road-course Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoff race on a layout unlike any other. That, at least, was the way reigning series champion Martin Truex Jr. put it. When he tested on the Charlotte road course in October, Truex described the road course/oval track hybrid as “all kinds of craziness going on.” That was before the track made tweaks to the 2.28-mile course that should make it faster and more intense, lopping as much as 20-seconds offRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Editor Don’t count Dale Earnhardt, Jr. as a fan of the traction compound that was used during Sunday’s Bank of America 500 at Charlotte. The compound, which has been used with mixed results at Speedway Motorsports, Inc. tracks this season, was laid down in the second and third grooves at Charlotte, but things didn’t quite gel between the cars on track and the ability for the compound to increase grip. Trouble with the PJ1 compound started on Friday in practice when a handful of drivers, includingRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor As first reported on Twitter by Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Atlanta Motor Speedway will not repave their 1.5 mile track for next year’s race, electing instead to postpone their plans for at least a year. The track, which has not been repaved since it was reconfigured in 1997, has shown increasing signs of wear over the years and as a result has been revered by drivers for its challenging race conditions, including heavy tire fall-off and cars slipping and sliding around on the worn-out surface. EvenRead More

By David Morgan, NASCAR Contributor Since joining the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series circuit in 1998, Las Vegas Motor Speedway has had just one race date on the calendar, but starting in 2018, that changes. On Wednesday afternoon, the track and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority announced a $2.5 million partnership that would bring a second Cup Series weekend to the facility starting next season. With the schedule already jam packed and NASCAR not looking to add any race dates, that would mean one of the other tracksRead More

By Owen A. Kearns, NASCAR Wire Service There’s a possibility, albeit remote, that O. Bruton Smith could be entering the NASCAR Hall of Fame as a race car driver instead of a race promoter extraordinaire. Smith, at age 17, bought a race car and decided to be a professional driver. “One time, I actually beat (NASCAR Hall of Famers) Buck Baker and Joe Weatherly,” Smith said in a May 7, 2005 interview with Motorsport.com. “So I knew when I beat them I could be a contender, right?” Smith’s mother, however,Read More