I couldn't help but note that for the third successive week that weather has become a factor at the track. Las Vegas had unexpectedly cold weather that may have impacted the performance of the cars to an extent, especially since previous testing was done in much warmer weather. The Atlanta race last weekend was rained out on Sunday and then run on Monday, on a track with different characteristics as the rain washed away the rubber laid on the track. Granted, both of these races did not experience what Bristol experienced today -- the first race of the 2006 season where qualifying was cancelled.
The weekend at Bristol may be a crapshoot. I actually had tickets for this race weekend (which I sold), but, given the weather I have seen so far, I may not be regretting that I am not there. I have been to races where the weather has been questionable in the past (the 2004 Darlington fall race was downright frigid, not getting out of the 40's even with the sunshine), and this is the stage in the season where the weather can be most volatile. I only attended one previous race in the spring at Bristol (2003), but the weather was okay that day. The volatility happened to miss because it then snowed at the track within the week after and was coincidence to miss the race weekend.
Tracks that have spring dates that aren't in the deeper south, such as Bristol or Martinsville (next week) or even Atlanta (last week), can suffer through questionable weather for racing. The very reason why baseball has spring training in Florida and Arizona in February and March is that the weather doesn't tend to stabilize up north until April. NASCAR would probably shuffle the dates on the schedule if there was ability to do so. Realistically, only Daytona, Talladega, Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, California, and Texas offer year-round reasonable weather. Races around Atlanta or further north are just asking for trouble in March or at the end of the season in October or November. I think it is pretty safe to say that Rockingham, which had the second race of the season only two years ago, had to suffer with bad weather and weakened attendance as well being in southern North Carolina.
Consider that Charlotte, the hub for most race teams, doesn't race it's first race of the season until May ... Charlotte is further south than Bristol or Martinsville. It even comes on the schedule after Richmond, which usually is safe enough in early to mid-May.
The thoughts of expanding the schedule into further north locations like the New York city metro or Washington state can only mean that race dates in the summer months are a necessity, not a choice. The Talladega race probably ought to be a little earlier in the schedule than it is, but given the racing similarities to Daytona, it doesn't get too close to it's sister track on the calendar. Likewise, California Speedway doesn't need the Labor Day race in September ... a track further north would benefit from that date for weather.
Since I didn't intend to get too lengthy in this post, I will cut short my thoughts on the oddity of a schedule that criss-crosses the country twice in a two-month period. The racing teams all have to transport from Daytona to California, then likely back to Charlotte in the off-week. They then travel to Las Vegas before journeying back to Atlanta the following week. Then, only a few weeks later, they travel to Texas from Martinsville, then further west to Phoenix the next week, before looping back for the race in Talladega at the end of April. Wouldn't it seem more rational to travel out to California with a progressive path back to the east from there to Las Vegas, then Phoenix, then Texas, and so on? I guess the race teams could potentially still go back to Charlotte in between (logging thousands of miles), but the cars they use between the aforementioned tracks may not be significantly different from each other.
In any case, I digressed from the topic of this post quite a bit, so I will close it now before things get out of hand.
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