What went wrong at Bristol?

After watching Friday night’s Busch Series race at the new Bristol, I very nearly wrote a blog Saturday predicting that I was getting ready to see one of the best Nextel Cup races I’d seen in the nearly 11 seasons that I’ve been doing this.

I was certain that the Sharpie 500 was going to be memorable, given the prospect of having cars race two- and three-wide for 500 laps at my favorite NASCAR track.

When the race was over, though, I was trying to figure out who to blame. Who ruined this race? What caused Bristol to turn into Mini Michigan? I felt like Wilford Brimley in that scene from “Absence of Malice,” when he was telling Sally Field or Paul Newman or somebody that when he left he was going to have somebody’s backside in his briefcase to take with him.

I needed somebody to blame. I know some people think I am crazy. They saw cars running side-by-side at Bristol Saturday night, and they noted that a faster driver didn’t have to knock a slower one out of the way to pass him. This is because, for some reason, they enjoy watching racing a half lap or so away from the leaders. Me? I’ve never understood that.

The drivers loved the new track, thought it was fantastic. Well, bully for them. But they get paid to race, and it shouldn’t be about what they like. I don’t know a whole lot, apparently, but I do know that the more drivers like racing at a place the less likely fans are to want to watch races there.

Racing is about winning, isn’t it? I will guarantee you nobody among the 160,000 fans in attendance sat in hours of traffic afterward talking excitedly about how great it was to see three guys battle for 19th. Fans who see a race at Bristol will go home with great memories, but Saturday night most of those memories were about the place, the hoopla and the pre-race festivities.

The race itself? Kasey Kahne led 305 laps, then Carl Edwards led 182. David Ragan wrecked three times. And that’s just about it. It was, to say the least, a letdown. I spent much of the night and the entire drive home trying to figure out who or what to blame.

The Busch race was about as good as it gets, and that race was held on the same new track and on the same supposedly hard tires that the Cup guys had to race on. The only real variable I can think of is the car of tomorrow, but it seems too easy to lay all the blame at its feet. But I do think that’s part of the problem, and it’s a problem that ought to scare NASCAR to death.

What happened at the front of the field Saturday night, pure and simple, was that while the leader had clean air on the nose of his car he was unbeatable. That’s aero push, and if it’s that bad at Bristol with the COT what’s it going to be like next year when that car runs at California? I’ve been told a thousand times that when you take away mechanical grip, aero grip is all you have. The COT takes away downforce. Harder tires take away grip, too. So when you have less grip from other sources, air winds up being the trump card.

The only time things got a little racy up front at Bristol was when a leader came up on traffic and didn’t have the good air on the nose. So it seems to me that to fix that, you need to give the car itself more grip or give the teams tires that have more of it. NASCAR controls everything about the COT, so if it doesn’t have somebody at its research and development center working day and night on getting more grip into the car, then shame on NASCAR.

I am SO tired of hearing that Goodyear had to be “conservative” with the tire because they didn’t get to test tires on Cup cars before the race at Bristol or somewhere else. Teams pay $2,000 a set for four new tires and the average team gets eight to 10 sets of tires per weekend. Do that math for 43 teams over 36 races and doesn’t it seem like Goodyear could afford to have its own testing program? If Goodyear can’t afford such a program, maybe NASCAR could help fund it, or find a tire supplier than can pay what should be that cost of doing business.

Why doesn’t NASCAR have about five or six people who either still work for Goodyear or once did and who know all there is to know about racing tires working with them on making the COT better? Maybe they already do, but if those guys are already on the job there was little evidence at Bristol that they’re making any headway.

I get a lot of feedback from race fans these days about all of the things they think are wrong with NASCAR. They complain about how much it costs to buy tickets and reserve camping spots. They gripe about the sport being too vanilla, or too politically correct. Television ratings are down, significantly, and NASCAR has all kinds of excuses about why. Fans say it’s because of when the races start, because the broadcasts have too many commercials and annoying announcers or, as happened at the end of Friday’s Busch race, somebody goofs up and turns off the satellite feed.

Frankly, I am sick of all that, too.

Not because fans don’t have the right to complain, but because they’re complaining about a bunch of little stuff that wouldn’t matter one bit if the product was what it ought to be. If a race leader got passed in the final 100 miles of race on any regular basis anymore, would people really care whether Dale Earnhardt Jr. got the No. 8? If fans felt like races were competitive tests of man and machine instead of a three-hour science class, would anybody be worked up over ESPN missing a restart by two or three seconds? I don’t think so.

So, in a way, I guess I blame myself. Apparently, I haven’t been focused on the right problems when trying to understand what’s going on in NASCAR. I still have to write and talk about whether Joe Gibbs Racing is going to Toyota and about what companies are going to sponsor Earnhardt Jr. in his number whatever car next year. But I promise you that as of Saturday night I am going to spend as much time as I can asking people if the road that NASCAR is heading down is really the road to competitive ruin.

When you mess up Bristol, things have gone entirely too far.