The Frontstretch: MPM2Nite: Martinsville Shouldn't Lose a Date... It Deserves Another by Matt McLaughlin -- Thursday March 25, 2010

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MPM2Nite: Martinsville Shouldn't Lose a Date... It Deserves Another

Matt McLaughlin · Thursday March 25, 2010

 

The two Cup dates at tiny Martinsville are circled on my calendar as “must see” events. The racing there isn’t always spectacular, but the ratio of classics to clunkers is about as good as it gets anywhere on the circuit. And as two of just six short track races left on a schedule once dominated by dates on the bullrings, racing at Martinsville is a welcome throwback to the good ol’ days. In fact, this oval is the only one that’s held Cup races since the inaugural 1949 Strictly Stock season – and that alone awards it legendary status.

Yet this Spring, there are ugly rumors Martinsville might lose one if not both dates in the interest of expediency and larger markets on next year’s schedule. Such a move would have once been thought unthinkable, but given the fate of North Wilkesboro, Rockingham, and the Labor Day event at Darlington it’s not unprecedented. Let’s put it this way: I don’t trust the black-hearted bastards that are the barons of our sport today to keep their greedy little fingers off tradition, no matter how cherished or important it might be.

On a purely practical and soulless level of thinking, it’s easy to see why Martinsville is on the Endangered Species list. The neighboring town the track is named for (population: 15,416) is one of the smallest that still hosts a Cup date. To the marketers behind the sponsors who splatter their colors across today’s Cup clown cars, rural, western Virginia is barely a blip on the radar. Grandstand capacity is also amongst the smallest on the circuit (around 67,000), though in fact track management has managed to post a pretty good ratio of butts to seats compared to some of the grand palaces of speed added to the circuit in the last decade. Others argue that in this era of 900 horsepower funny cars posing as “stock” cars, the equipment has simply outgrown the tiny little half-mile track.

Balderdash. (And that’s not my first choice of words.)

A valid argument could be made that racing at Martinsville and reining in those 900 horsepower monsters on the relatively narrow tires our series features takes more driver talent than just about any race left on the circuit. Horsepower is great on the straightaways, but the two at Martinsville pass in little more than the blink of an eye. That makes managing the brakes and tire wear the keys to winning there. For even if a driver has the fastest car that particular Sunday afternoon, he is quickly faced with the challenge of lapping slower cars shortly after each restart. With this paperclip largely a one-groove track, passing opportunities come few and far between – even for someone that is markedly faster than his intended victims. Patience is at a premium, too, and sometimes it quickly erodes away. With no place for slow cars to turn, the easiest way to pass at Martinsville is to lay a front bumper to the rear of the car that’s holding a driver up and move him out of the way.

Martinsville has been a mainstay on the NASCAR schedule since its inception. Still, the sport is considering taking away one of the track’s two dates.

The “bump and run” is part and parcel of racing at Martinsville. As the pay window begins to open towards the end of a race, those competing for the lead often suffer severe lapses in manners. Some newer fans find this sort of racing barbaric, but for old school purists the bent fenders, smoking tires, and frayed tempers are racing the way it ought to be done.

That contact isn’t always unintentional, either. For decades, drivers have used this place as a means of revenge, paying back others for incidents where they were the innocent victim on one of the series’ faster circuits. Turning the tables is easy to do here; and with beating and banging so much a part of racing at Martinsville, it’s difficult to determine whether contact was intentional or inadvertent. As an added bonus, speeds are low enough it’s possible to send a clear message to another driver off your front bumper without risking crippling him, like Carl Edwards’ moment of indiscretion at Atlanta did with Brad Keselowski. No less a driver than Bobby Allison, one of the sport’s iron men, purportedly used to tape a note with the car numbers of his intended victims on the dash prior to each Martinsville race.

Worn tires, a soft brake pedal, vengeful competitors, paperclip corners, and engine abuse can make for a long afternoon out on this half-mile. And it is in the blast furnace of short track racing that legends are forged forever. Richard Petty won a record 15 times at Martinsville, Darrell Waltrip won eleven times, and Jeff Gordon has won here seven times. Cale Yarborough won half-a-dozen, and most recently, Jimmie Johnson won five of six consecutive Martinsville Cup races between the fall of 2006 and last spring’s event. Just how good is Johnson at Martinsville? He hasn’t missed the top 10 there since the spring race of 2002. He caps a list of drivers that have won a ton of championships and races, but my guess is that they look at the Grandfather clocks — the coolest trophy on the circuit — they earned at Martinsville with special affection and pride.

Lately, NASCAR has been talking a good game about winning back disenchanted, longtime fans who have been leaving the sport in droves over the last five seasons. Well, taking a Martinsville race date away would prove that talk has been nothing but lip service. Fans come from near and wide to attend Martinsville Cup races, but the locals are particularly loyal to the track. There are third and fourth generation fans who sit in the same seats their grandfathers did back when the race cars had tailfins.

The pundits would have you believe that the current economic downturn is the first and worst such event in recorded U.S. history, but we’ve been through lean times before. And every year, those same loyal fans kept flocking back to Martinsville, managing to scrape together the money for their tickets. I recall in days of yore, the backstretch seats used to go on sale early Sunday morning at reasonable prices for blue collar fans, and the dash to get in resembled the Oklahoma Land Rush. Fans might head to Daytona or Charlotte like sheep following the herd, but for truly devoted and knowledgeable race fans, the trip to Martinsville was like a pilgrimage to see “real” stock car racing – not high speed acrobatics.

Martinsville’s founder, the late H. Clay Earles, was always appreciative and accommodating towards his fans. In 1955, Mr. Earles decided to pave his then-dirt track. He’d found that fans like to make a family event of the races at Martinsville, but the ladyfolk weren’t fond of going home with their hair and clothes coated in dust. A lot of drivers of that era felt Earles was ruining a perfectly good race track by paving it, but the intervening 55 years’ worth of races have shown that daring experiment has worked out pretty well.

The magic of Martinsville is that it is the land time has forgotten. Improvements have been made to accommodate the fans, but the track surface itself looks a lot like it did five decades ago. Messing with tradition there is dangerous business. When ISC took over the track, they tried altering the Martinsville hot dog, perhaps the circuit’s greatest (questionable) cuisine — and even that simple move caused more outrage than the Edwards/Keselowski incident at Atlanta. ISC wisely backed down almost immediately, returning those beloved dogs to the original recipe enjoyed by traditionalists with cast iron stomachs.

Finally, sponsors had better wise up. It doesn’t matter if the races are held in sunny and populated Los Angeles or bucolic and southern Martinsville, the majority of fans taking in the event, watching the rolling billboards that are today’s race cars and watching the commercials during a Cup broadcast are scattered coast-to-coast. The true NASCAR loyalists, the ones who make purchasing decisions based largely on brands affiliated with racing, remain centered in the small towns of the Southeast. They’ve been washing with Tide, drinking Bud and Pepsi, and dining at McDonald’s for decades. For all NASCAR’s attempts to take on the Bright Lights and Big Cities, this sport remains a product of small town America. Sitting in the stands are the guys and gals that ride out on the pumpers with volunteer fire departments when the sirens sound late at night, who get misty-eyed during the playing of taps after the Memorial Day parade, and who wrench on their own American-made cars in the driveway most Saturday mornings.

Despite the hype of the ads of late, those people are the heart and soul of NASCAR, the blue collar folks who lace up their boots and head to work at a different kind of “office” Monday morning. They head to the bank to cash their paychecks on Friday afternoon, and spend Saturdays fishing or working on a buddy’s local dirt track car. When focusing on other major markets, sponsors risk alienating these folks who spend their hard-earned dollars, often still earned in what they term “dollars per hour,” at their own risk. Sure, a race at Vegas or L.A. might be more appealing to the corporate clients they can get into a luxury suite at the track, but those aren’t the folks who make up the backbone of the economy unless we’re talking about imported luxury cars, high-end speedboats, and sand castles along the coast.

So Martinsville not only deserves its two race dates annually, but it probably deserves a third. And while that’s never going to happen, it’s time to declare “hands off” when it comes to the oval’s two existing dates. As the sole remaining track left that held an event in NASCAR’s inaugural season — and given the loyalty of the Earles family towards Bill France, Jr. — the original Martinsville has got to be grandfathered against future schedule shifts.

Now, more than ever, it’s important for NASCAR officials, fans, drivers, team owners, and crew members to take these two journeys a year back to Martinsville to remember where this sport was born – in the hard scrabble, rocky soil of the Southeast beating and banging on short tracks on a Sunday afternoon.

From small things, Mama, big things sometimes come. But even the mightiest Hickory tree is doomed if it loses hold of its roots, and for Cup racing, Martinsville remains the taproot.

Take a date from Martinsville? Brother, you might as well bury a dagger in the heart of stock car racing.

Contact Matt McLaughlin

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Fred
03/25/2010 05:22 AM
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Wow, NA$CAR seems to be going out of its way to shoot itself in the foot… over and over.

They killed Bristol with the combo of the CoT and the variable banking. Which in turn, caused Martinsville to become the new Bristol IMO. And now they are thinking of taking a race away from it?

I guess we’ll have to wait until Sunday to see how much the Economy was a factor to Bristol not selling out for the first time in over 25 years. If Martinsville’s numbers are just as bad, then maybe you can put most of the blame on lack of extra cash. But I am betting that it will be close to being sold out.

I think Bristol now ranks up there with Fontana… a boring track and when times are tough, you don’t buy a ticket.

Bristol has lost the “hold me up for 2-3 laps and you get the chrome horn”, Martinsville still lives up to that… and is what makes racing there exciting to watch.

And I still say take a race away from Fontana and give it to Vegas. Vegas may not be the best track, but it is located just a few miles from a million or so hotel rooms. Also, plenty to do when there isn’t anything happening at the track. And keep in mind, I live 30 miles from Fontana… and still am 60 miles from L.A. Fontana is 2 counties over from Los Angeles… no one ever seems to mention that fact. It isn’t an L.A. race. So basically, if you stay in a hotel near the track, you are pretty much in the middle of no where. Which pretty much sounds the same as you just said about Martinsville… except I bet they don’t have stop and go traffic during the weekends when there isn’t a race there, as Fontana does.

VABlueGrass
03/25/2010 07:20 AM
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Martinsville can’t handle another date, they can’t sell out the two dates they have.

Martinsville dropped the ball by not moving the railroad track and adding more seats. Sure they have a high “butts to seats” ratio, but they’d still lose in that category Fontana if SoCal only had 67,000 seats.

Martinsville is comparable to the old Yankee Stadium. The house that Ruth built was lush of tradition, memories, and die hard fans. But still… a face-lift was needed.

The only “lifts” that have occured at Martinsville in the past few years are the cost of camping (in a camper… forget camping in a tent, you’ll end up in quarentined areas like a second class citizen). Then, once you’re in the track you get to pee on the walls… but with the quality of the martinsville hot dog, you think an updated restroom facility could be provided.

Die Hards may attend Martinsville races, but the casual fan isn’t going to “make a weekend out of it” in Martinsville. Yee-haw! Let’s go to the Wal-Mart and Taco Bell! So what do we do with the other 71.5 hours of the weekend?

Crispy Brats
03/25/2010 07:23 AM
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Don’t even waste your time at that Taco Bell. I SWEAR they have the LOWEST order accuracy rating in AMERICA!

… like playing the lotto.

Gordon82Wins
03/25/2010 07:49 AM
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The bulk of the money is made from television, not so much from fans attending the events. The racing at Martinsville is like nowhere else, and if it is replaced by Kansas, people watching on TV will be saying “hey, weren’t they just at this track two weeks ago”?

NASCAR would effectively kill any goodwill they’ve gained with the hardcore fan by taking a race away from Martinsville.

DansMom
03/25/2010 08:07 AM
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NASCAR isn’t trying to appease the hardcore fan. NASCAR is attempting to recruit new casual fans.

Casual fans lead to the ratings increase in the early 2000’s. Casual fans have driven up ratings and revenue in Football.

The NHL appeases hardcore fans and die hards. But how does that work-out for the NHL?

Josh Cox
03/25/2010 10:32 AM
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I completely agree with you! While Martinsville may not need a 3rd race, don’t take away the two that it has. I have been a NASCAR fan for a long time, since I was little and always loved the racing that I watched on TV and in the stands at Bristol, Talladega, Chicago, and for the first time this weekend; Martinsville. But as of late I have found myself watching fewer and fewer races on TV because they are just not exciting. Places like New Hampshire, Michigan, California, are just flat out, single file, no passing, boring! How does NASCAR take care of this? By shutting out new tracks like Kentucky and Iowa to make sure that the goofballs at ISC are making their money and then they only continue to take away dates or sometimes complete tracks from the circuit that provide great racing to give worthless tracks like California second dates. I will refuse to watch that stupid race both times this season because I actually fall asleep. There are enough tracks in this country that we shouldn’t be visiting a track twice in the same season short of the superspeedways and that would make racing interesting again, a different track every weekend. That would sure help out the Chase too, if the last 10 races included Road America, Kentucky, Iowa, Rockingham, and others! Just my two cents.

Gina
03/25/2010 11:01 AM
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Great article! We love Martinsville and have tickets to both races and we drive from NJ to go to this track. NASCAR/ISC keeps trying to kill it off though – the spring race used to be the weekend after Easter and the weather was always beautiful, sunny and enjoyable. The last few years with the move of the date into March, it’s been rainy and cold. I really hate it when NASCAR does stupid stuff like this. If they take Martinsville off the schedule, well, they may not think 67,000 seats are a lot, but the fans who made up that group at this track ARE the fan base. Every time they take a track with real racing off in favor of a “big market” or another cookie cutter, pounds another nail in the coffin of the sport. I don’t even bother to watch the Kansas race or Chicago or heaven forbid Caliboring on TV any more. That’s not racing, it’s a high speed parade. Give me a short track any day.

Steve
03/25/2010 11:36 AM
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Short track racing used to be the majority of the schedule. The uniqueness of each track provided excitment each week leading up to the race. The races themselves were entertaining because the drivers actually had to drive the car, they could care less about points racing, and winning was the most important thing. A champion was determined by points awarded for all 36 races and no 10 races were any more or less important than the others. The races were so entertaining, I would watch the race not ever missing a lap and if I couldn’t watch it live, I would record it and watch every lap later.

Boy do I long for those days again.

DansMom
03/25/2010 11:56 AM
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I bet TV ratings are down this week.

24Crazy
03/25/2010 12:03 PM
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“From small things, Mama, big things sometimes come. But even the mightiest Hickory tree is doomed if it loses hold of its roots, and for Cup racing, Martinsville remains the taproot.
Take a date from Martinsville? Brother, you might as well bury a dagger in the heart of stock car racing.” AINT THAT THE TRUTH!!!!

BoxerShortsOnFri
03/25/2010 01:04 PM
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I hear the Martinsville taco bell ranks last in the nation in order accuracy. Just what I heard.

DansMomsSon
03/25/2010 01:07 PM
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I… am… glad… I… don’t… go… to… the… Martinsville… race.

I… Don’t… like… jeff… gordon.

Carl D.
03/25/2010 01:12 PM
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You just can’t beat good short track racing like at Martinsville. Both my trips to the track have been enjoyable and the racing has been great. I still refuse to eat one of those scarlet hotdogs, though.

I can’t make it to Martinsville this year, but I will be at Greenville-Pickens Speedway Saturday for the K&N Pro East Series kickoff. Ive never been to G-P, but I hear the track is similar to Martinsville… half-mile paved oval with little banking. I can’t wait. The race will be telecast on Speed on April 1st.

midasmicah
03/25/2010 02:19 PM
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Just when some fans are getting (a little) interested again, I hear this. The new rule changes have perked my interest somewhat, but nas$car seems to have this built in self-destruct switch within easy reaching distance. nas$car needs to change it’s logo the a huge dollar sign with the words “GREED ABOVE ALL” imbossed in the middle. Like other long time fans, I love the few short tracks that are left on the schedule. To put it bluntly, if Martinsville goes, I go. Take this seriously, nas$car.

Mike
03/25/2010 02:29 PM
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I do not like Martinsville. Been there twice and hated it, especially that gross so called hot dog. I do not like a track were the only way to pass the guy in front of you is to knock him out of the way.

It would also be nice if they could pave the place. Slipping around on wet grass is not fun.

For those of you who do go and need a room we always stayed in Greenville N.C. It is a half hour drive to the track from there.

Martinsville to me is a toilet and I would not go back even if the tickets were free.

Chris
03/25/2010 02:32 PM
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Interesting and Informative article. I totally agree with the sentiment.

I also agree with Gordon82Wins. This taking away dates from legendary tracks is pretty awful. That is the problem with NASCAR. It always wants to compare itself to other sports. Why not be its own different thing? Why does it have to conform? Why does it have to have events at only strategically located places? This cold, hard, greedy obsession with Money that the Powers that be have will eventually kill big time stock car racing.

mkrcr
03/25/2010 09:53 PM
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@Mike, yea, ain’t it a bitch when you break a heel on that God awful grass. Good grief dude, what do you expect, a martini and cigar bar? I ain’t there to be catered to, I’m there for the racin’ and these days you’re not going to find much better. It’s a shame NA$CAR has stripped most of the real racetracks from the series. They may have actually had a chance at recruiting long term fans instead of all the newbies that drive the “market”.

laidback racing
03/26/2010 10:27 AM
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Good article matt. I LOVE Marty and went after they killed the Rock…until ISC bought it. I am giving up the OVERPRICED Bristol tickets and returing to Marty next spring. So much for my boycott I guess.

Sadly, I think they will lose a date NOT THAT I WANT OR THINK THEY SHOULD BUT I think they will lose the chase date. NASCAR doesn’t want to be in martinsville va during the playoffs. My prediction is Atlanta and Marty lose a date and Kansas and Vegas get one…somehow I think kentucky is getting one too but I don’t know from where.

Grumpy
03/27/2010 08:48 PM
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“Balderdash”, Do you really mean “Bovine Scattotomy” to quote Gen STORMIN’ Norman Schwartzkopf?