Bristol dirt race was absurd but ingenious. It’s the innovation NASCAR needs

The image that played on a loop in my mind after watching NASCAR race at Bristol Motor Speedway wasn’t of stock cars racing on a dirt track.

It was Russell Crowe in a scene from the 2000 film Gladiator.

In the scene, Crowe single-handedly slays a pack of circling opponents. Their swords, shields and helmets are no match for Crowe’s character, a former Roman general named Maximus. The rage over his slain family fuels him as he quickly cuts each adversary down. In the most climactic moment, Crowe stabs one rival gladiator through the chest using two swords, pulls the swords out to hold one in each hand, then performs a gory, scissor-like decapitation of his rival.

He throws one bloody sword into the stands where the nobility sits. The crowd gasps, and Crowe looks around the stadium and shouts, “Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you’re here?”

Silence. Then cheers.

Maybe because it was at Bristol, dubbed “The Last Great Coliseum,” that my brain was recalling movie lines from more than 20 years ago. Or perhaps it was the pent-up anticipation that followed two days of rain at the track, including one day of torrential flooding, so that when the stalled racing spectacle finally happened under a bright and cloudless sky, it appeared more grand.

It wasn’t that I was expecting the cars to spontaneously combust when they hit the racetrack, but I know that NASCAR hadn’t put Cup cars on a dirt track in 51 years and the idea of shipping more than 2,000 truckloads of dirt onto a concrete oval for a few major events seemed to make about as much sense as storming into a pit of gladiators without a helmet.

But when all was said and done, after Joey Logano secured his first win of the season — his 27th career victory in the Cup Series — during a highly watchable event, I imagined any of the executives behind NASCAR’s Bristol dirt efforts calling into the stands and FOX camera lens addressing the naysayers, “Are you not entertained?”

I still had to process what I’d witnessed, but, all right, I was entertained.

“All in all, I’d give it a thumbs up with some things to learn,” NASCAR’s executive vice president Steve O’Donnell said. “The fans had asked us for years to look at innovation around the schedule. In fact, we’ve been taken to task for not making some moves.”

“We were bold and aggressive this year. I’m proud of the team for doing that, proud of the industry for taking a chance here,” O’Donnell continued.

It wasn’t a flawless event. Heat races were washed out for weather, and pre-race and mid-race competition adjustments were made. NASCAR added two competition cautions and altered its original stage lengths to allow for more mid-race track maintenance. During the race, NASCAR switched to single-file restarts from typical double-file restarts to mitigate dust, which appeared to be Monday’s biggest issue.

“For fans’ sake, for visibility of the drivers’ sake, I think a lot of the wrecks happened because of the dust and we couldn’t see anything,” said Denny Hamlin, who finished third.

Although the race ended in overtime, there wasn’t a dramatic finish that dirt driver Christopher Bell called a “key ingredient to a great race.” Still, Bell said before the race that he was worried about excessive cautions and the event being a demo derby, which wasn’t quite the case. More inexperienced dirt drivers finished out front, including Logano, Hamlin and Daniel Suárez in the top-five, along with dirt aficionados Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Ryan Newman.

Logano said that he didn’t consider himself a dirt racing expert, but offered his advice for the dust problem by suggesting a night race in the future.

“I think that brings some of the moisture up from the dirt,” Logano said. “I think that would help. Plus you don’t have the sun glaring through the dust. That’s what made it really hard through Turns 1 and 2.”

NASCAR will have plenty of time to make tweaks between now and next spring, when Bristol’s half-mile will again host a Cup race on dirt. The speedway announced the plans during the final stage break in the race — “I like how they waited to see that it was going well before they announced they were doing it again,” Logano said with a laugh — and O’Donnell indicated that NASCAR’s intention is to return to dirt “in ‘22 and beyond.”

“Our hope was this would be a success, something we could repeat, become really a staple of the schedule going forward,” O’Donnell said.

The event certainly intrigued fans. I talked to multiple who were longtime NASCAR fans, but first-time Bristol attendees who bought tickets simply to see something new. The weather delay was an unfortunate hitch, and likely limited turnout from an originally estimated 30,000 to 40,000 sellout crowd to the lower end of that range (tracks do not release official attendance numbers), but many fans were committed to waiting it out.

Jackson Schmitz, a 17-year-old who said he has been a NASCAR fan for five or six years, was one of them. He said he made the trip to Bristol from Ohio with his father.

“I just wanted to see history on dirt,” Schmitz said.

Another woman I spoke with said she got on her first flight since the pandemic to travel from Arizona with her husband to watch the race. She said Saturday that she had to return home before the rescheduled events, but planned to use her honored ticket at another track.

NASCAR can’t control the weather, but it can control its schedule and the sanctioning body made a clear statement Monday with the news of its Bristol return that it will stay committed to pushing the envelope — not just in a single trial year before the NextGen car. Could a street course race be on the horizon? NASCAR announced last week that its iRacing Pro Invitational Series would run a virtual event on June 2 on a Chicago street circuit around virtual landmarks in the city.

“We want to continue to innovate,” NASCAR’s vice president of strategic initiatives Ben Kennedy told NASCAR.com. “We want to continue to protect those prestigious events like the Daytona 500 and the Coke 600, but also be able to go to new markets and shake things up.”

A street course wouldn’t necessarily bridge to a bygone era by connecting to the sport’s dirt racing roots like the Bristol event, but it would be another stunning spectacle. The cost wouldn’t be excessive human carnage like in Gladiator, either, just excessive amounts of money and more logistical planning.

Television viewership numbers and ratings haven’t yet been distributed by FOX, so it’s tough to say how NASCAR’s ingenuity or absurdity (depending on how you see it) panned out, especially given the rain delay. But as someone who was at the track to witness Bristol’s Food City Dirt Race I can tell you it had a Gladiator-like quality. I was entertained.