Author: Glen Harness

Since I gave up being the webmaster for the racetrack at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds (now called Music City Motorplex), I pretty much stopped going to the races there. Apparently, I’m not alone. Their “experiment” last year of having the races on Friday was a big failure, and it’s obvious that they didn’t recover from it this year.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I went to the “Southern 300” this past Sunday. First off, if you’re gonna put a number in the name of the race, it needs to have some relationship with the number of laps or miles or even kilometers. The Southern 300 used to be a 300-lap race for the premier division at the track. Today, it’s a 200-lap late model race, a 100-lap truck race, and a 75 lap street modified (now called grand national) race. Where you get “300” out of that I have no idea. And they’re doing the same with the All American 400 next month. It’s not really a 400-lap race.

Anyway, this season I went to a few races. Car counts are about what they were last season, which is just barely above a dozen. I don’t know if it’s the officiating, the purse or what, but back when Bob Harmon was running the show, 30 late models was a low number.

Also, the few races I went to, there were a couple of cars that dominated the race. Boring. Boring racing will cause fans to not come back in droves. I don’t know if they’re using crate engines or if they’ve gone back to letting teams build their own, but they need to equalize the cars better.

I’m not sure what the track needs. All I know is that there doesn’t seem to be the “spark” that used to be there. They had (yet again) live music before the race. I hope those folks played for free; I’d hate to think that they’re paying performers to come out and perform in front of the 50 people who arrived two hours early. The crowd ended up being pretty good by the time the races started, but for the 90 minutes before, there was no need to have a live band because there were so few people.

Actually, I can think of one thing the track needs: publicity. I just happened to remember that the Southern 300 was running that weekend from my prior visits to the track’s web site. They might have run ads in the newspaper, but I don’t get that rag so I don’t’ know. I listen regularly to the radio station that Norm Partin used to be on, but didn’t hear one single ad. Nothing on TV either.

As the person who created the first web site for the track, back in 1996, I think I’m qualified to comment on the state of the current web site. First off, if you’re using Firefox, you might as well just start Internet Explorer when you want to go to the site. I don’t know what the webmaster is doing, but the site looks awful in Firefox. Secondly, the site is too “noisy”. Yeah, I know they’ve got to have sponsors and stuff, but the layout is just messy. Thirdly, there’s not much historical info on the site, and what little there is is woefully out of date. I did a LOT of historical research for the web page; it’s sad to see that not much is on there now. And finally, I was at the track every Saturday night, posting updates on the web site as the races happened. Fans of the track who were out of town or no longer in Nashville always liked those in-race updates.

Now that I’m on a roll, another thing the track needs, and I hate to say it because I know the PA announcer, is a new announce team. I know they’re both doing the best they can, but they have two strikes against them: 1) they’re not really up to the level of Joe Williams and Malcolm West, and 2) you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway. Joe and Malcolm set the gold standard for announcers; they work incredibly well together (I believe they still announce the races at Nashville Superspeedway and Memphis Motorsports Park). They’re entertaining and they know what they’re talking about. And that PA has needed an overhaul for several years. But with the future of the lease in limbo, there’s no incentive for the current leaseholder to do any improvements to the PA or any of the facility.

But the biggest problem with the track is the Fair Board. Right now the big question is, will it continue to be a track after next year? The Fair Board seems to have their heads up their butts and actually asked folks if there still needed to be a track there or something else. And they’ve supposedly hired some type of consultant to give them recommendations on what to do with the property. Can you imagine the Nashville Sports Authority doing something like this to the arena or the stadium?

I don’t know what ideas our new mayor has regarding the track. All I know is it’s a part of racing history, NASCAR history, and Nashville history. It’d be a shame for it to be plowed under for a minor league ball park.

I guess the main conclusion here is that, while there are problems at the track, none of those can really be addressed fully until the Fair Board decides to give someone a long term lease.

I went to see the “Southern 300” Sunday at Music City Motorplex. The main reason I went was to see former Nextel driver Sterling Marlin race. I hadn’t seen him race at the Fairgrounds in probably 10 years, so I was looking forward to it.

Before the race, I logged onto the Motorplex’s web site to get the starting lineups. I was pleased to see there were 25 cars in the field (which is about 10 more than average these days) and that Sterling and his son Steadman were starting in the top 10.

I was surprised then when the race started that they were both in the back. I figured that they’d changed engines or something and had to go to the rear. I was surprised today to learn that they’d been put to the rear for having soaked tires. Was Sterling that unsure of his car or talent? He won two track championships there, not to mention two Daytona 500’s, so I think he’s capable of winning there.

There was really no need to try to cheat to run well. Once the race started, he zoomed towards the front and was running 7th when he had throttle “problems”. One now has to wonder if he really had any problem at all; did he exit early because he knew his car wouldn’t pass the post-race inspection?

I’m really disappointed in Sterling.

Otherwise, the race was pretty good. It was nice to see that many cars on the track. It’d be great to see the track get back to the level it was when Bob Harmon ran it. If they had 25 cars then, that was considered a low car count. Thirty or so cars were the norm. Same is true for the SuperTruck division. They used to average in the mid twenties for starters; now they’re lucky to get a dozen.

In a later post, I’ll put forth a few thoughts about what’s wrong with the track and what it needs to get back on its feet.

Anyway, it was good to see Skip McCord win the race.  I’d seen him race several years ago on a weekly basis (in the SuperTruck division I think). Recently he’s been working at Bobby Hamilton Sr’s shop as a fabricator, and the trophy for the race was named in honor of Bobby, so that was pretty fitting.

Next year the NASCAR Busch Series will be known as the NASCAR Nationwide Series. The insurance company signed a seven year deal with NASCAR to become the title sponsor of the second-tier series, and to become their official insurance company, replacing Allstate.

In a lesson perhaps learned with the AT&T fiasco this year, instead of grandfathering in Geico, a competitor of Nationwide, they’ll be sunsetting that sponsorship after two years. In other words, the team with the Geico sponsorship has two years to find another sponsor.  I guess that beats getting sued, but I still don’t think it’s correct that NASCAR has prior restraint on someone’s contract.

There’s been talk that NASCAR is looking to change the cars in this series in the next couple of years. With that in combination with the Car of Tomorrow being used exclusively in the Cup Series next year you would think that it would lessen the number of Cup guys in the series (guess they’ll have to come up with a name to replace Busch wackers; maybe claims adjusters?).

The Truck Series doesn’t have this problem; those drivers don’t have to worry about a dozen “outsiders” coming in every week, taking their points and prize money. And as a result, the battle for the championship is very close. It’s so close that NASCAR doesn’t need to “fake” up a chase to make it exciting.

Speaking of exciting, the Talladega Cup race was pretty good I thought… except for that one spot right before halfway where they all decided to stop racing and play follow the leader. I think the finish would have been more exciting if Earnhardt and Waltrip hadn’t had troubles. Of course, Stewart did his best to make it exciting, swerving from one lane to the other. No wonder he’s never won there.

I really had high hopes for the Car of Tomorrow. It made sense that if the cars were more or less identical, that would put the driver back in the driver’s seat, as it were.

But it’s beginning to look like I was wrong.

About 7 or 8 years ago at a televised race at Nashville Speedway USA, I got to talk to Buddy Baker. I’d been mulling over an idea that I wanted to get his input on. What if all the cars in NASCAR were alike, just like the IROC Series? He didn’t think too much of the idea. If I remember right he said the well financed teams would find a way to tweak the cars so that pretty soon, despite being the “same”, they’d have the advantage back.

I guess he was right.

Dover’s race Sunday was the latest chapter in the Car of Tomorrow saga. Only six cars finished on the lead lap, and the margin of victory was over a half second. Now granted, the Dover races have always been some of the most boring races on the planet (I used to call them the 24 hours of Dover). They even reduced the races from 500 to 400 miles because they took so long. But I don’t remember the last time so few cars finished on the lead lap.

I’m still waiting to find out the definition of “the big one.” In my mind, any wreck that involves nearly 25% of the field qualifies as a big one, but yet you only hear complaints about big wrecks at the restrictor plate races.

Carl Edwards “won” the race, but his car was impounded after the race to be taken to NASCAR for further evaluation due to the right rear being too low. Now maybe there’s a problem with the Car of Tomorrow, since this happened to two cars at New Hampshire. If that’s the case, then NASCAR needs to make it right with the two cars that were penalized then. But if not, then why should Edwards get credit for a win?

Earlier this year I was in favor of all the races next year being COT races, but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Of course, it’s too late to go back to NASCAR’s original plan to run a partial schedule with the cars of tomorrow next year. However, it certainly looks like more R&D needs to be done on the cars.