Bob Barnard Track Engineering

I had a lazy day yesterday after being up watching the F1 race from Melbourne, and what a good race it was. So, I tuned in to the NASCAR race from Bristol.

Now I should tell you that in US sport folklore there are two stadiums where you cannot buy a seat, you have to wait till someone dies. These are Green Bay in the NFL, and Bristol. Well there must have been an epidemic in Tennessee as to me it looked two thirds empty! Shocked is the only word to describe my reaction. As you will know if you read my blog recently about the death of spectator racing this is how most race tracks look, and NASCAR has been struggling, but this was something different. If you cannot fill more than a third of the seats at Bristol then you are in real trouble. It seems you can tinker with the way the cars look, and I do prefer the current crop, but if there is something inherently wrong then that is not going to fix it. You cannot keep on blaming the economy, it is slowly recovering, and there is a great crop of good young drivers, so what is going on here?