Why NASCAR turned Bristol into a muddy throwback to its dirt-track roots

After an audacious feat of engineering, Sunday’s Food City Dirt Race won’t be held on an existing dirt track. Instead, NASCAR has transformed Bristol Motor Speedway, a storied, high-banked, concrete oval in northeastern Tennessee, into a temporary dirt track by hauling in 23,000 cubic yards of local red clay and packing it on top.

It is a bold gamble, full of unknowns that have made it the most anticipated event of the 36-race season. Chief among them: Will the hard-packed dirt stand up to the pounding of 40 hulking stock cars shoving, bumping and sliding over what driver Kevin Harvick calls “the longest dirt race in the history of mankind”?

Whether Sunday’s 250-lap race around the 0.533-mile oval turns out to be a dirt-caked thrill show or a caution-filled crash-fest with only a few cars running at the finish is anyone’s guess. The only certainty, said former driver Clint Bowyer, who’ll provide commentary from the Fox broadcast booth, is plenty of wrecks.

“There is going to be some carnage, some sparks, beating and banging,” said Bowyer, who raced on dirt growing up in Kansas. “Show me a good dirt race that’s never had that.”

NASCAR’s top series ran its last race on dirt in September 1970 at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds. It was won by seven-time champion Richard Petty, who claimed 40 of his record 200 victories on dirt.

But dirt wasn’t the image that R.J. Reynolds wanted to project when the tobacco giant signed on as NASCAR’s sponsor in 1971 and proceeded to streamline the schedule, spruce up the tracks and name the top division the Winston Cup.

NASCAR’s popularity took off over the next three decades, fueled by charismatic drivers, fierce rivalries, free-spending corporate sponsors and a speedway-building boom in major media markets such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas-Fort Worth, with luxury suites, catered banquets and helipads for high rollers. Smaller southern tracks with few amenities and rickety grandstands were abandoned to make room on the schedule.

Stock-car racing’s boom slowed to a halt, however, not long after Fortune magazine in 2005 proclaimed NASCAR “America’s fastest growing sport.” Several top drivers retired. The sought-after nationwide audience lost interest. Many longtime fans felt cast aside, convinced NASCAR had taken their loyalty for granted amid its headlong rush for mass appeal. Others griped that safer cars were making the races dull.

Since then, NASCAR executives have tinkered with everything from the racecars to the rule book, trying to reverse the slide in TV ratings and ticket sales. At Bristol, where sellout crowds of 150,000 packed the towering grandstands in the sport’s heyday, executives simply ask fans what they want.

“After every event, we do fan research,” said Jerry Caldwell, the track’s executive vice president and general manager. “We ask the fans, ‘What other things would you like to see at Bristol Motor Speedway?’ Dirt racing has always been on that list.”

So with NASCAR’s blessing, track officials decided their March 2021 Cup race would be on their own, dirt-covered oval. Though seating capacity will be limited to roughly 40,000 because of coronavirus protocols, tickets sold out within days.

Each paved track on NASCAR’s Cup circuit has its own personality. The biggest and most treacherous is the 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway, while paper-clip-shaped Martinsville Speedway is the smallest (.526 miles). Pocono Raceway is a triangle with no two corners the same, and road courses zig and zag.

Dirt tracks are a different beast altogether, with personalities that change over the course of a race. Dirt tracks are watered before the start, to help with traction. But they dry out lap after lap, and what started as tacky mud turns to dust, making the cars trickier to handle.

Building and maintaining a dirt track demands a mix of science, engineering, trial and error and old-school savvy.

When officials at Bristol decided to transform their concrete oval, they visited several dirt tracks around the country to learn “all the nuances behind dirt,” said Steve Swift, vice president of operations and development at Speedway Motorsports, which owns Bristol. They also consulted with a California-based expert known as Dr. Dirt and took samples from 18 local sites in pursuit of the ideal native red Tennessee clay.

Then came construction.

All told, the job required enough dirt to cover a football field nearly 13 feet deep. But because Bristol is essentially a bowl, with 30-degree banking in the corners, the dirt couldn’t be spread evenly like frosting. The banking was too steep to hold the tractors and graders needed to spread and pack the clay. So the dirt had to be built up heavily on the inside of the track until the corner banking was lowered to 19 degrees — still extreme for a dirt track.

It took much of January and February to construct, and Bristol officials chronicled the transformation on the track’s website with drone footage and a live camera.

While NASCAR’s Cup Series abandoned dirt a half-century ago, dirt tracks are the lifeblood of local short-track racing in several parts of the country, from the late models kicking up clay in the South, to the big-block modifieds in the northeast, to the sprint cars in the Midwest.

It’s on those circuits where the bulk of expertise in preparing dirt cars resides. But there are a few exceptions in the NASCAR ranks. One is Team Penske’s Jeremy Bullins, crew chief of Brad Keselowski’s No. 2 Ford, who grew up working on dirt late models in North Carolina. As Penske’s fleet prepares for the Bristol race, Bullins’s insight on the challenges of dirt is key.

The big worry is the engine overheating. If the track is too wet, mud can clog the radiator. If it’s too dry, dust can seep into the engine.

“Dust is less of a concern than actual mud, because it tends to pass through,” Bullins said. “But if you fill up the grille with mud [and] you don’t get any air to the engine, you’re in trouble.”

Teams will use special filters to guard against that. But there are other worries.

Given the likelihood of heavy contact — even more than is customary on Bristol’s tight confines — the cars’ bodies must be more durable in key spots without adding weight. Because Bristol is a short track, speeds aren’t too high, so wrecking there isn’t so much a safety concern as it is a costly headache for team owners whose cars get totaled.

Visibility is a question, too. Dirt cars don’t have windshields; they’re impractical given the amount of mud and debris flying around. Instead, drivers put layers of clear plastic on their helmet’s visor and just tear them off, one at a time, when they get so caked in mud they can’t see.

NASCAR’s Cup cars, by contrast, have windshields but no wipers. So it’s unclear how well drivers will be able to see if dirt builds up between scheduled pit stops when crew members can yank dirty windshield tear-offs.

“We’re taking our Cup cars that are tremendous asphalt cars and trying to race them on dirt,” Bullins said. “So you have to think about all the things you need to think about to be successful — things we don’t normally have to worry about — and just hope you’ve thought about every possible scenario.”

Some NASCAR drivers, including Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and third-generation sprint-car racer Chase Briscoe, were reared on dirt tracks before making the leap to stock cars. But there’s no guarantee their familiarity with dirt will pay dividends Sunday.

Sprint cars, with their powerful engines (950 horsepower) and light bodies (1,250 pounds), are ideally suited to running on dirt, quick and nimble through tight corners in heavy traffic. NASCAR’s Cup cars are bulky behemoths in comparison, generating 700 horsepower and weighing 3,400 pounds. Engineered for pavement, they can top 200 mph on a long straightaway, but they don’t corner nearly as well as a purpose-built dirt car.

“It still has a lot of horsepower, but it’s just very heavy,” Briscoe, the rookie driver of the No. 14 Ford, said of NASCAR’s Cup car. “It doesn’t want to do what you want it to do [on dirt]. You really have to manhandle the car.”

Seasoned dirt drivers will have an edge in “reading” the track. They’ll know by the color of its surface where to find the best grip — the darker lanes with more moisture — and be able to anticipate how the track will change in 20 or 50 laps.

“It’s hard to learn overnight,” said Briscoe, who has been peppered with questions in the run-up to Sunday’s race by Harvick, his asphalt-schooled senior teammate at Stewart-Haas Racing.

Other NASCAR drivers with minimal dirt experience have squeezed in practice laps and races on dirt tracks in the Mid-Atlantic to get a feel. Chris Buescher was among a handful of Cup regulars who entered last weekend’s Bristol Dirt Nationals, a series of short races in lighter cars that also served as a test run for the track.

“There are just a ton of unknowns in it,” Buescher said afterward, unclear if he gained anything but fun from the experience. “What caught me off guard, really, was the amount of dust. … The dust is just insane.”

NASCAR hasn’t said whether it plans another dirt race next season. But if the racing is good Sunday, if TV ratings are up and fans are happy, NASCAR may find that part of its future borrows from its past.

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