Something about Talladega brings out emotions in nearly everyone, and they seem to run the gamut from “love it” to “hate it” and everywhere in between.
Blend lines, plates, drafting, the Car of Tomorrow… it’s all up for debate when we get here every year, and this year, it seems like it’s a notch higher than usual.
Plus, contract talks — and please tell me that we’re not heading down the primrose path blazed by the NFL, major-league baseball and the NBA — have dominated the news here. Kevin Lepage’s blend-line faux pas was frightening to watch and perhaps even more frightening to the drivers.
Face it. Talladega is a big, nasty, scary place, and when you’re motoring around at better than 200 miles per hour you really want some control over your own destiny, and at Talladega, you’re at the mercy of several things.
First, your competition plays a role, because you can’t pass by yourself here. It’s a function of physics and the technical box the teams are in isn’t any help. So you have to have help, and it has to be the right help.
Also, when folks commence to wreckin’, they wreck for a real long time. In Saturday’s Nationwide Series race, Dario Franchitti was hit by a car that was eight seconds behind him entering turn three.
So, it’s a different animal. It’s a big place with lots of grip and lots of room.
There are tire issues, too, as evidenced by Matt Kenseth’s wall-banger just 21 laps into the race and Carl Edwards’s cut-to-shreds right front, which was down to the cords when he pitted under green 20 laps later.
What has happened, not just at Talladega, which is billiard-table-smooth and grippy to boot, but at all tracks, is that Goodyear’s tires are too good. They don’t fall off, lasting longer than a fuel run, and that means everyone runs the same speed.
That leads to packing up, and while it’s common here, it isn’t everywhere else. You can pass here in a pack, but you can’t at a lot of places with the current car.
Not to get too far into the rant here, but we’ve just been through about all the biggest buttons that NASCAR fans will push about the sport they love, and I’d still buy a ticket to a race at Talladega.
Compare Talladega to Daytona, and it’s the physical plant I’m talking about. Daytona is all slick and corporate, and so are parts of Talladega, but it’s the drive in that is the key. From the interchange at I-20 and the main entrance, there were no less than 12 places selling firewood, Mardi Gras beads and other essentials for the revelry that goes on in the infield, the infamous Talladega Boulevard.
That’s part of its charm, old Talladega. It’s NASCAR at its most elemental. A big place out in the country where they go fast, party hard and enjoy the heck out of the whole thing.
Maybe NASCAR needs less flash and more…Talladega. That ought to swing those “hate it” votes over to the other side, don’t you think?