Bristol’s Intimate Setting Sets It Apart

Bristol Motor Speedway, a racing jewel tucked in the hills of northeast Tennessee, must be seen to be believed. Even after seeing it, it’s hard to believe.

“I’m not sure you could try to build a speedway like Bristol and it would have the success that Bristol has had,” owner Bruton Smith said when asked why no one else had built a track like it in recent years. “Bristol is people. Bristol is an area of the country that is unique. I think that’s the thing.”

Bristol also defies comparisons, but it’s worth a try.

* Think of a half-mile paved oval, the size of Irwindale Speedway -- ringed by 164,000 seats. Twice a year, on Winston Cup dates, the speedway becomes the third largest city in Tennessee, behind only Memphis and Nashville.

And it keeps growing. The 4,000-seat Dale Earnhardt Terrace was dedicated last month. The community of Bristol, which straddles the Tennessee-Virginia state line, has only 24,800 residents.

“You come around a corner in an old country road and when you see it, you swear it’s a flying saucer that landed,” said Brian Tracy, former National Hot Rod Assn. executive.

* Think of the Bump ‘Em rides at carnival Fun Zones, where the object is to whack the other guy as often as possible. With 43 high-bred stock cars on a tiny half-mile oval with only one racing line, bumping and banging are the order of the day. Often, the only way to get around a slower car is to squeeze half a fender under the car in front and bully your way past.

“It’s such a tight place that everybody is hitting each other and bouncing off one another every lap,” Bobby Labonte said. “It is like covering yourself in honey and jumping into a beehive.”

At the Sharpie 500 on Aug. 23, there were a record 20 caution flags, nearly all caused by cars spinning and crashing in the velodrome atmosphere. With 36-degree banking in the turns, Bristol’s claim to be “the world’s fastest half-mile” is valid. Cars get around the track in just over 15 seconds. By contrast, Irwindale’s record is 17.3 seconds.

“Racing at Bristol is like being thrown around in a wild carnival ride for four hours,” said Dale Earnhardt Jr. Mark Martin, a seven-time winner there, likens it to “flying a jet fighter around the inside of a basketball arena.”

Said Robby Gordon, “Bristol is a rush-hour interstate at 120 mph. It’s down-and-dirty racing. It’s racing at its best -- a short track with high banks.”

* Think Metallica and Black Sabbath trying to outdo one another in a duel of decibel ratings. Put 43 cars blasting out 800 horsepower at 9,000 rpm and couple that with 164,000 screaming fans and it becomes absolutely impossible to hear the person sitting next to you.

Bristol is not called “Thunder Valley” without reason. It is so loud at the top of the steep grandstands that one fan said, “I’ll bet Neil Armstrong could hear the noise from Bristol when he was on the moon.”

* Think of a Finnish sauna, complete with steam rising up from hot rocks and you just about have Bristol in August. With temperatures in the high 90s and humidity to match, there isn’t a dry piece of clothing in the stadium by the time the first lap is completed. And there are 499 more to go.

When the green flag waved for the Sharpie 500, there were so many camera flashes in the stadium that it looked like a laser show.

As a hedge against the heat, nearly everyone wears white. The effect, noted David Poole of the Charlotte Observer, is that of a football stadium where the home team’s color is white. “There’s more white here than there is orange at a Tennessee game,” Poole said.

Inside the track, where pit stalls line both short straightaways, the scene is one of the most colorful in racing -- about 50 gigantic team haulers sitting side-by-side, inches apart. Their sides are covered with gaudy advertising of sponsors, like DuPont, Viagra, U.S. Army, Budweiser, Kellogg’s and Tide, and larger-than-life pictures of drivers such as Jeff Gordon, Martin, Mike Skinner, Earnhardt, Terry Labonte and Ricky Craven -- to match names with the sponsors listed.

Bristol wasn’t always so big. When it was built in 1961, by Larry Carrier, Carl Moore and R. G. Pope, it had a tidy capacity of 18,000. Total cost of the land, which had been a dairy farm, and construction, was approximately $600,000. When Carrier sold the speedway to Smith in 1996, the capacity was 71,000 and the purchase price $26 million.

Smith has continued the expansion and there now are 52 luxury skybox suites. “The first time I saw Bristol, I thought it looked like a football stadium, with all those seats all around it,” driver Sterling Marlin said.

It was, in fact, a football stadium once. For one game.

“In 1961, Larry [Carrier] invited the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles to play an exhibition game in his new stadium,” recalled Denny Darnell, a former Bristol manager and now an R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. senior manager. “The players didn’t want to play because the field was so torn up, but Larry told them they had a contract, so they played. Norm Van Brocklin quarterbacked the Eagles and Sonny Jurgensen the Redskins.”

Perhaps it would have been better if they hadn’t. NFL football wasn’t what it is today and only 1,300 showed up to watch. “That was the last time football was played there,” Darnell said.

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Drifting Along

An Irwindale Speedway crowd of approximately 9,300 last Sunday helped usher in the first professional appearance in the United States of the Japanese sport of “drifting.”

Japan’s Katsuhiro Ueo won the inaugural D1 Grand Prix, defeating Nobutero Taniguchi in the final runoff of the Yokohama-sponsored event. It seemed fitting that the Fullerton-based tire company should sponsor the event as it appeared that the primary objective of drifting is to burn off as much tire rubber as possible while negotiating power slides and tricky broadsides side by side with another sliding car.

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Southland Scene

The Sprint Car Racing Assn. will hold its 12th main event in 28 days Saturday night, a 30-lap feature at Perris Auto Speedway. After three weeks running in a combined Non-Winged World Championship series in the Midwest, the SCRA returned home last week for a doubleheader.

Cory Kruseman won his 60th SCRA race in the Jeff Bagley Classic at Ventura on Saturday night, tying Rip Williams for all-time wins. Then Williams made it 61 the next night at Perris.

Flat-track motorcycles will headline Ventura Raceway’s weekly program Saturday night as former Grand National champion Gene Romero brings in his West Coast Flat Track riders for Round 7 in an eight-round series. Sharing billing will be U.S. Auto Club Ford Focus midgets.

Stands figure to be crowded Saturday night at Irwindale Speedway because the Figure 8s are back. One of the track’s most popular draws, the 8s will join late models, super stocks, super trucks and legend cars on the program.

Glen Helen Raceway is expecting a record-breaking entry for its 24 Hours of Glen Helen motorcycle race this weekend. Racing will start Saturday at 10 a.m. and finish at 10 a.m. Sunday.

Kelly Collins, a Corvette driver from Corona del Mar, will team with Oliver Gavin in an attempt to overhaul Ron Fellows and Johnny O’Connell in the GTS class of the American LeMans series this weekend at Mazda Raceway in Laguna Seca. Collins and Gavin trail the leaders, 113-83.

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Passings

Frank Faulkner, 84, the University of California professor who guided the early racing career of Indianapolis 500 winner Danny Sullivan, died in his sleep Aug. 21 at his Berkeley home.

One week before Faulkner’s death, Sullivan carried him from his house to the passenger seat of a new Porsche and gave the racing enthusiast one last ride around the block.