Let The Engines Roar: by Anthony Baker

Nascar heads to thunder valley this weekend as it’s time for the Food City 500, which is a 500 lap race around the half mile concrete oval known as Bristol Motor Speedway or otherwise known as the last great Colosseum. It’s going to be a cool weekend as temperatures are expected to be in the 60s but questions remain about how the tire will react this time around. Let’s get into it. This is just the 2nd spring race in the next gen cars and I say this because I believe that was one reason as to why tire wear was so insane last spring along with the cold temps. With now a year of spring data and warmer temperatures I don’t believe that we will see the tire fall off at the rate that we saw last year. I do think there will be some wear later into a long run that falls off significantly. With the traction compound I thing track position will be important early and the bottom line will be the preferred line unless we see some tire saving mode. I expect this race to be a ra...

The heavy difference between the Saturday race and the Sunday race at martinsville speedway must be studied. There was complete chaos on Saturday especially in the later stages of the race, but on Sunday the race was quite tame. While it must be noted that racing in the cup series at this track took a hit compared to the gen 6, but the racing compared to the xfinity series is still way less chaotic. So the Xfinity series raced at martinsville speedway in 2006, but after that race they didn’t return for 14 years. Once they returned it was nothing but chaos.Since their return to the paper clip, the racing has provided quite a bit of controversy including the most recent race this weekend. This is a stark difference from how the cup series races have been as there has been less passing but less wrecks as well. The Xfinity series has time and time again had races at the track start off as racing and ending in slam and run racing. It showed even more true this past Saturday as several d...