divine_madness said:
Right, me being a total NASCAR n00b... why do the tracks make such a difference to the quality of the races?
It's fairly obvious with 'normal' tracks and certain bends etc. providing more opportunity than on another track but an oval is an oval, they just seem to change in size...
Ah, but there are ovals and then there are ovals. Differences in banking angle, differences in track width, differences in corner radius, differences in surface. Bullring type short tracks, short ovals, longer ovals, tri-ovals, superspeedways....
Plus you get the really oddball places. Darlington for one - sort-of egg shaped, narrow groove, seriously hard on tyres. No other track they go to is like Darlington. They even have to build extra bracing into the right-hand side of the cars that go there, simply because they know they'll be tagging the walls (hence the term 'Darlington Stripe' - scraping the paint off the right side of the car!).
Martinsville is another odd one - slowest of the oval tracks that they go to, it's like two drag strips with a couple of handbrake turns at either end....The cars have to pull from down low in 4th gear right up to the upper rev range by the time they're getting on the brakes for the next turn (no time to shift, got to do it all in 4th).
***edit***
And I can't leave out Pocono - a triangle. Three seperate straights linked by shallow banked turns. Scene of a horrendous crash that saw Steve Park and Dale Earnhardt Jnr flatten a guardrail in the infield, and walk away without a scratch.
