NASCAR back on dirt at Bristol with revamped Easter night race

By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer

It’s the second verse and, most likely, not the same as the first.

As the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Bristol Motor Speedway for its second race on dirt, there are many things that should make the racing different — and hopefully better.

The first is racing at night. Running the race in the daytime last year resulted in so much dust that it was difficult for the drivers to see. There was no way to keep enough water in the track to prevent the creation of dust as the heavy stock cars circled the track at high speed. 

Track officials also had to be wary of watering the track too much, as NASCAR saw a few days earlier, when the trucks had mud caked to their windshields and front grilles in a practice following rain.

To have a night race and in hopes of making it a spectacle, NASCAR and FOX opted for Easter Sunday night (7 p.m. ET on FOX). NASCAR has not raced a Cup event on Easter in more than 30 years, but the idea was that with this race needing to be run at night, there could be an increased audience with little competition from other sports on the holiday.

"We have to race at night," said Joey Logano, who won the Bristol dirt race last year. "That was important. Because you just couldn't even see the cars, and it was unsafe inside the car."

The track is different, too. Last year, it was banked 19 degrees. This year, it's banked 16 degrees at the apron, and it gets progressively steeper, up to 18 and then 19 degrees, closer to the wall. It also has more of a bowl in the middle.

The intention is that drivers won’t view the bottom groove as the groove they must race in, thereby giving an option of lanes and potentially decreasing the amount of rubber ground into the track, which can make a dirt track slick.

Kyle Larson has competed on the track in a dirt late model.

"I did feel like the track was a lot smoother ... and the entries of the corners seem to be a little more sweeping, so a lot easier to run wide-open in the late model," he said.

A dirt late model has suspension designed to allow drivers to slide in the dirt. A Cup car does not.

Larson said that with the banking Bristol has, it won’t develop a "cushion" of dirt near the wall, which sometimes is the best place to run on a dirt track.

"They till the top, and it makes it look like there's a cushion, but it's not really a cushion," he said. "Even late models, even when they had it, if you got your right rear above what looks like a cushion to a novice fan, it sucked the drivers a little higher.

"So if you're going to run the top, you had to be just below it." 

The tires are different, too. Last year, teams used a bias ply tire that would be more effective on the dirt. This year, the tires are radials. Goodyear is using lower profile sidewall that it hopes will behave similarly to a bias ply tire. Cup teams run radials at all the other tracks, and their tires for all races increased from 15 inches in diameter to 18 inches for this year. Goodyear also changed the tread in hopes of handling the heat.

"I feel like the tire is better than what it was last year, just the tread on it ... and it’s going to be better because this tire is wider," Ryan Blaney said. "The tire is wider, so it’s going to make it a little bit more racy, which will be good.

"Hopefully, adding banking up to the top will let it kind of widen out." 

Stewart Friesen, a truck series veteran with decades of experience racing on dirt in a modified, did the NASCAR and Goodyear testing. He did a test at Lancaster (New York) Speedway in the late fall and another at Bristol last week.

"It was definitely a little bit faster," he said. "The track was just in really good shape. It was overcast, wet, had a lot of grip to start the day. The sun did come out later in the day, and it did dry up.

"So we got a lot of different variations of track. With the race being at nighttime, that's going to help the race tremendously just in its own aspect."

At the test, NASCAR took the windshield out of Friesen’s car and had a screen of relatively thick bars in front of the driver’s seat. The idea behind that is the track could be tackier (more muddy) because mud wouldn’t cake on the windshield. They had another car run in front of Friesen to kick up mud.

But NASCAR opted to keep the windshield because it didn’t have enough time to vet a screen enough to be confident from a safety aspect.

"We kind of got to work on that too late," Austin Dillon said. "Moving forward, we need to figure out a way that we could put those bars in to protect the driver's hands. ... We’re just too late in the game to kind of make that call, but hopefully, following up if we do another dirt race, we can pop those windshields out.

"It's not hard for us to weld bars in and make some kind of cover for our hands and feel comfortable about what could happen."

Also at the test, Friesen’s car was fitted with various covers of the windshield car cooling duct and the hood radiator ducts and changes to the underbody of the car (plastic floor instead of carbon fiber) to help it manage the dirt. The Cup cars — already different than last year — won’t have a front splitter (same as last year), and the rear diffuser will be made of plastic and won't have the vertical extensions that could have collected dirt or dragged the ground.

Every organization was allowed to attend the Friesen test last week, and NASCAR announced Wednesday its rules on optional screen coverings for various ducts. NASCAR also announced that rear rain flaps — mud flaps, essentially — will be required behind the rear tires.

"We tried some mudflap stuff that I thought worked really, really well," Friesen said of his test.

With so much new, there obviously are unknowns.

"How’s the car going to cool?" Logano said. "How's the car going to handle mud and dirt? Where's it all going to collect? What's the dust going to be like in the car? ... There'll be some things we'll have to learn."

Logano hopes to get a jump on learning by competing in the truck race Saturday. Logano and Harrison Burton are Cup drivers who have landed rides with David Gilliland Racing. Dillon will drive for Young’s Motorsports. Chase Elliott will drive for Spire Motorsports, which won last week at Martinsville with William Byron.

Kevin Harvick, who ran the truck race last year to gain more experience, didn’t seem to think it was necessary this time, especially with the truck having a different shifting pattern and other different elements than the Next Gen car.

"I just don't feel like I need to be messing around with that," he said. "I need to be concentrating on what I'm doing in the Cup car. The younger ones can adapt a little bit faster to memory and doing the things that they need to do.

"So this is a lot different than anything I've done." 

Some things will be the same as a year ago. The heat races are set up the same (though last year they were rained out).

The heat lineups will be determined by random draw, and the starting lineup for the race will be determined by the heats. Drivers will get points based on where they finish on a 10-to-1 scale, with an additional point for every position improved from where they started the heat to where they finished (no negative points). Ties in overall points will be broken by owner points.

There will be no choose rule, just like a year ago. NASCAR will use double-file restarts but have the option to go single-file, just as it did in the race a year ago for safety purposes.

And there will be no live pit stops. Teams can only change tires and add fuel during the stage breaks, which will be six minutes.

It’s a lot to take in. Maybe Logano just has confidence from last year, but he doesn’t seem worried.

"It’s going to be fine," he said. "We make a bigger deal out of things than what it really is all the time."

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What to watch for

Watch to see if the drivers with significant dirt-racing experience, such as Kyle Larson, Chase Briscoe and Tyler Reddick, adapt more quickly this year than the others.

It didn’t happen last year (surprisingly), but the vision issues in the dust bowl didn’t necessarily lead to those drivers being able to "read" the dirt to determine the best racing groove.

Other drivers with significant dirt experience: Austin Dillon, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Ty Dillon and Justin Allgaier. 

Thinking out loud

NASCAR doesn’t have pit crews for the race at Bristol. Because the cars are coming from the dirt surface to the concrete pit road, NASCAR didn’t want drivers trying to maximize their time on pit road.

All pit stops during the stage break will be controlled stops, with drivers not losing position in the pits as long as they are able to change tires and fuel in the six minutes given to do so without a rush.

That was fine for the first dirt race. But part of a Cup race is a "live" pit stop. Amid the pandemic and with last year being the first race on dirt, not having live pit stops was understandable.

It’s understandable not to have them this year. Potentially damaging the pit equipment with all that dirt probably is a consideration. But is it a good thing? In addition to researching whether to remove the windshield, NASCAR should look to see if returning to live pit stops is feasible for future Cup races on dirt.

Social spotlight

They said it

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Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass. Looking for more NASCAR content? Sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass!