Weather-Based Schedules for the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Season

Coming up with a NASCAR schedule is tough work.  And I know this because I tried to objectively create one based on one single factor alone- weather.  What I found is that there isn’t much room for big changes to the schedule to minimize the issue of weather impacts on attendance (cold/hot and/or wet race weekends) and racing in general (wet weather), at least given the list of tracks we currently have to choose from.  But given the opportunity to make changes in 2015 with the new TV package and the issues we’ve had with Mother Nature this year, I felt like it was worth looking at what would be the best schedule based solely on average weather conditions at each track.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just basing the schedule on weather.  Many other factors, many of which most fans probably aren’t even aware of, come into play and can cause a logistical nightmare, where coming up with one solution creates 10 new problems.  But humor me- Here I have done my best to come up with a schedule based solely on the best weather conditions each week, with little attention given to logistics, and another schedule based on my experience in meteorology and the study I’ve done on historical weather data at each track combined with being a hard core fan of the sport for 30 years.

A little more about my experience in meteorology, just to hopefully give a little credibility to this study.  I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Meteorology from Florida State University, which I received in 2003.  I worked as a local TV meteorologist for 5 years, but since 2008 I have been working as a meteorologist for natural gas and power trading operations in Houston, Texas, and now work for one of the largest energy companies in the world where in addition to forecasting for cities all over North America for the trade floor, I also predict weather impacts to our offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring the safety of all our employees and contractors during severe weather events.

Again, I mention this to separate me from just a fan with a crazy idea… hopefully.  

Being a long-time attendee at Atlanta Motor Speedway, I have seen how weather can affect attendance, and being a meteorologist I know why some tracks shouldn’t have (or shouldn’t have had in the past) races on certain dates.  What I’ve done is create a very basic index based on temperatures and average precipitation. 

There are countless ways to come up with an index for weather at racetracks, and you could make them as complicated as you want.  Maybe one day I will, but for now, I wanted to keep it simple just to see if it would make any difference to the schedule.  Take the daily average amount of precipitation and compare it to the average yearly total precipitation at that track, and take the daily average temperature and compare it to room temperature, 72 degrees.  Combine these two factors, and the lowest values indicate the best weather conditions week to week. 

There are some obvious things that come up.  Homestead, Phoenix, Vegas and California are good for racing anytime in the spring or fall.  Northern tracks are only good from June to September… etc.  But there are some interesting things learned through the analysis I did that could lead to a good alternative schedule.  Note that in the schedules I’ve created, I’ve left some historic dates intact because it wouldn’t make any sense to change them.  The Daytona 500 is still race #1 and should always be, and the Coke Zero (Firecracker) 400 there needs to remain on July 4^th weekend.  And the Coke 600 has to be the weekend of Memorial Day because, well it just does. 

Texas Motor Speedway actually has favorable weather for a large chunk of the season.  We could easily race there in mid-March and usually avoid issues with cold weather.  And more importantly in my book, that would reduce the odds of severe weather impacting TMS during a race weekend.  That’s a ticking time bomb in my opinion.  I always thought that instead of getting rid of the March race at Atlanta, they should have swapped dates with Texas and put it in April.  My index clearly shows this would have been better for both tracks…. But I digress.  I’m still bitter about losing one of my Atlanta race weekends.

What I found as I tried to pick tracks for certain dates is that we simply have too many races up north that make it hard to fit all the other tracks together in a way that makes sense, especially the northern tracks that have two dates.  There’s a reason Pocono’s races are so close together in the current schedule- it’s because they have such a short window of comfortable and dry weather there.  The same can be said for Loudon (NHMS), Michigan, and to a somewhat lesser extent Dover. 

Now, I’m not big on taking races away from places, but three of those four tracks which have limited weather windows during the season- Dover, Pocono, and Loudon – have been talked about in the past regarding either attendance issues or the racing action.  Personally, I like Pocono and Dover because they are both very unique and challenging.  I’ve never been a fan of Loudon, but there are plenty of New Englanders who are already screaming at me having read that statement.  But if one or two, or all three of these tracks were to be reduced to just one race a season, it would make this whole process a lot easier.  If I’m Bruton Smith, I get rid of the September race at Loudon and replace it with Las Vegas or Atlanta, or move the August Bristol race to that date and give the series an extra off weekend in the summer.  In fact, here’s an idea- take Loudon out of the Chase and in return ask for Bristol to get the last race of the regular season instead of Richmond, and move Richmond INTO the chase.

And if we are going to remove race dates from a few tracks, we can add a new track or two to the schedule, or just have a few extra off-weekends.  Maybe we could fit in an Iowa or Road America race in the early summer by taking a race away from Dover or Pocono. 

Under this new chase format, I really think the last race of the season would be best at a short track.  Ponder this- Last race of the season, four drivers, whoever finishes best wins the championship.  Put them on a track where not only could they still manage to win the race with a beat up car should they run into some bad luck or get caught up in someone else’s mess, but where going for broke by rubbing fenders or “rattling someone’s cage” is an option.  Look at how exciting the finish at Watkins Glen was due to what was at stake.  To me, this new format can ONLY work if you end the season at a short track.  And it gives a nod to the sport’s history, too.

The problem is, finding a short track in a climate suitable for racing in mid-November is really, really hard.  It’s hard to believe, but the only southern short tracks we race at are Bristol, Richmond and Martinsville, and none of those places have what I would consider favorable average weather conditions for a race weekend in mid-November.  Darlington isn’t really a short track, but is the shortest track with average weather conditions that are close to tolerable on my scale.  Even Vegas, which has been talked about as a good spot for the finale, is marginal at best and not much better than Darlington.  Realistically, the only track currently on the schedule that makes sense for that date weather-wise is Homestead.  So I guess I’m stuck with it.

I have nothing against Homestead-Miami Speedway.  In fact, if it’s going to remain the last race of the season, and we are going to ditch a couple of track’s second race dates, I think there is a strong argument that Homestead should have a race near the beginning of the season too.  I actually love the track, as it reminds me of the old Atlanta before they reconfigured it in the 90s.  It has produced some great racing since they added the banking, which I think at times has been overshadowed by a lack of excitement in the championship battle.  Plus, the weather there is perfect in early Spring (as well as mid-November).  I would say go there right after Daytona, but realistically that would probably hurt attendance at both tracks as we’re already in Florida for most of the month of February.  So, how about putting it in early April after a West Coast Swing… right around the time a lot of people are in Florida for Spring Break? Lots of potential there.

There has been a lot of talk about weekday evening races.  Personally, I don’t think it would work except for TV, and I am kind of tired of doing things for the TV business and not for track attendance.  Who other than locals or fans spending the entire week at a track are going to be able to attend a weeknight race in person?  It works at Daytona (the Duals) because it’s Daytona.  The only other place I think it could work would be at Charlotte for the All-Star Race.  I think we could try that first, see how the ratings and attendance are, and then consider trying it elsewhere if we still want to. 

So my schedule puts Martinsville in place of the All Star weekend and puts the All-Star Race on Thursday night before the Coke 600.  Yes, that does take away one of the “breaks” the teams get by being at home in Charlotte for two straight weeks, but that’s why I picked Martinsville- it’s just a few hours down the road and hugely popular among fans. Plus, you could give the teams an off weekend the following week since we’ve taken a couple races away elsewhere.

These are just ideas, and I am in no way saying it’s better than anyone else’s schedule that they’ve created.  But when you are coming up with something new, it is helpful to look at it from many different perspectives and listen to any and all ideas that have some kind of foundation underneath them, other than just personal opinion which could be biased to suit one’s own purpose.  If I had my way, Atlanta would get a second race date back, but my analysis shows that there are probably better options than that for everyone. 

I am confident that if there are any changes made by NASCAR, driven by track owners’ financial needs or not, they are looking at as many angles as possible and doing the best they can to come up with a schedule that works as well as it can.  What my analysis does not do is pay any respect at all to the cost required to travel from race to race under this schedule, events and activities at racetracks that would conflict with these dates, turnarounds for tracks to prepare (or repair perhaps) the facility from one race date to another, infrastructure, logistics, TV commitments, sponsors… and the list goes on and on.  And honestly, it could be that there is an even better way to index the weather than I’ve come up with, leading to an even better schedule based on the weather.  But maybe, just maybe this study gets to one of the powers to be and causes them to look a little closer at the impact of weather on the schedule.

Rows in red text indicate race dates I believe should never be changed.  Everything else is up for debate!  I have not taken into account which races could/should be run at night, only where they should be each weekend. "wx schedule" is the schedule I came up with taking only weather into account- this uses the current list of tracks on the 2014 Sprint Cup schedule and orders them based on my race-weather index.  "wx+personal opinion" is a schedule I came up with based on both average weather conditions from week to week, and my own opinion.

weekend of	wx schedule	wx+personal opinion
14-Feb-15	Sprint Unlimited	Sprint Unlimited
19-Feb-15	Budweiser Duals	Budweiser Duals
22-Feb-15	Daytona 500	Daytona 500
1-Mar-15	Phoenix	Phoenix
8-Mar-15	Vegas	Las Vegas
15-Mar-15	Auto Club Speedway	Auto Club Speedway
22-Mar-15	Texas Motor Speedway	Texas Motor Speedway
29-Mar-15	Darlington	Homestead-Miami Speedway
5-Apr-15	Talladega	Talladega
12-Apr-15	AMS	Atlanta Motor Speedway
19-Apr-15	off	off
26-Apr-15	Richmond	Richmond
3-May-15	Bristol	Bristol
10-May-15	Sonoma	Sonoma
17-May-15	off	Martinsville
24-May-15	Charlotte Coke 600	Charlotte Coke 600
31-May-15	Dover	off or add Road America
7-Jun-15	New Hampshore Motor Speedway	New Hampshire Motor Speedway
14-Jun-15	Michigan	Michigan
21-Jun-15	Pocono	Iowa
28-Jun-15	Martinsville	Kansas
5-Jul-15	Daytona	Daytona
12-Jul-15	Kansas	Pocono
19-Jul-15	off	off
26-Jul-15	Watkins Glen	Watkins Glen
2-Aug-15	Indy	Indy
9-Aug-15	Chicago	Chicago
16-Aug-15	Kentucky	Kentucky
23-Aug-15	Pocono	Michigan
30-Aug-15	New Hampshore Motor Speedway	Off
6-Sep-15	Michigan	Bristol
13-Sep-15	Kansas	Dover
20-Sep-15	Dover	Kansas
27-Sep-15	Martinsville	Martinsville
4-Oct-15	Bristol	Richmond
11-Oct-15	Richmond	Darlington
18-Oct-15	Charlotte	Charlotte
25-Oct-15	Talladega	Talladega
1-Nov-15	Texas	Texas Motor Speedway
8-Nov-15	Phoenix	Phoenix
15-Nov-15	Homestead	Homestead

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

The countdown to the Advocare 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway continues... 12 days until Cup Series race day!  Here's my 12th favorite memory from 26 years of attending races at AMS.

#12: Technological Advances in Camping at the Track in the 1990s, a.k.a. a Bunch of Engineers Who Think They Are MacGyver

First, you have to get to know some of the regulars in our campsite.  There’s my dad, who has a master’s in engineering and works for a major international commercial construction company.  Then we’ve got no less than three other guys who have similar jobs and backgrounds in engineering and construction, two of which went to Georgia Tech.  You would think there would be some pretty innovative stuff coming out of these guys.  Well, to be fair, I think Scott is pretty smart.  He comes in on Saturday mornings and brings us donuts.  Then again, when he first started coming to the races with us, he was a Jeff Gordon fan.  We all get better with age, Scott.  But I digress…  We’ve used welding gloves and a coat hanger to pull a turkey out of a turkey fryer because someone forgot to bring the hook (dad).  Yes, one of the guys just happened to have welding gloves in the back of his truck, I guess just in case he had to pull a turkey out of a fryer someday.   Stan once carved out of cardboard some shades to put over the windows of his van, so the lights from the grandstands wouldn’t keep him awake when he slept inside.  The next morning he was playing around with them and flapping them like wings, and my brother, Jeff, said in perfect comedic timing, “Stan you’re going to need some bigger wings.”  Okay, had to be there.  A lot of us sleep with ear plugs in our ears to drown out the noise of screaming drunk fans and annoying people who like to rev up their trucks or honk their horn at 3am.  Funny thing about that is a lot of time during the race we DON'T use any ear protection.  Go figure.

Now we aren’t exactly roughing it camping out at the track.  We have a couple generators, bring a TV, and we’ve even used electric blankets before because Atlanta races used to mean record cold or snow.  But, we are in tents, not RV’s like most of the campers in the infield, and other than a kerosene heater that had been dropped off the back of our truck in the streets of downtown Atlanta, we are exposed to the elements.  The 1990s were brutal at times weather-wise, and led us to attempt to weatherproof our campsite.  We always brought with us a canopy that we set up right next to our tent to make a little living area.  One guy who used to come with us would take the back seat out of his van, and we used it as a couch.  Genius.  The problem we had was that a canopy does not help keep you warm on a cold night if it has no walls.  Back in the ‘90s, we didn’t have the fancy pop up canopies with the zip-up walls like they have now, so we improvised.  For some reason, a guy named Neil who came with us one year had a bunch of large memo clips with him.  He came up with the idea to clip tarps to the canopy so that they hung on the sides and formed walls.  Believe it or not, this was quite effective when combined with a kerosene heater inside the canopy.  On those cold nights, we’d close up every gap we could find with a memo clip and all huddle up inside to stay warm.

Unfortunately, as we found years later, memo clips are surprisingly ineffective when any kind of wind blows up against the tarps they are holding together (who’da thunk?)  Yet, here we are 15 years later, and Stan still brings his plastic Kodak bags full of memo clips, rusted and broken from years of use, and we still use them.  You would think at some point we’d just all pitch in and get one of those nice zip up canopies.

Nahhhh...

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 12:57pm ·

#14: The Old Days- AMS when it was AIR

As you hopefully read in the first of my stories, our first race at Atlanta Motor Speedway was in 1985, only back then it was still called Atlanta International Raceway.  The track property was completely different back then, and in fact, especially thanks to a tornado that hit the speedway in 2005, it’s hard to find many structures today that existed 25 years ago.  The track itself is completely different now, with the start finish line on the opposite straightaway, and two dog legs added to make it a quad-oval.  Back then it was a plain oval, with long sweeping turns and relatively short straightaways.  Drivers used to say you almost never stopped turning the wheel there because the straightaways were so short.

The track I remember from the ‘80s had a red and white striped wall which for some reason always looked cool to me.  Especially on TV, it seemed to have a nice effect that added to the speed of the cars as the camera followed them… you could see the blur of the colors on the wall in the background.  I wish today’s tracks still had them.  The other thing different about the walls was that except for where there were grandstands (basically only the straightaways), there was no catch fence on the walls, allowing cars to actually jump the walls and tumble outside of the track in some of the worst crashes.  Before the races, I remember watching from the infield as fans would head to their seats, walking along the backside of the walls to the stands, and some of them hopping over the wall to experience the 24-degree banking in the turns.  We even remember seeing people ride up the hill to the walls on horseback.

Note the people on horseback behind the wall

There used to be billboards in the old turn 2 (now turn 4), and a “76 ball”.  Unocal 76 was the official gasoline of NASCAR back then, and if you remember the gas stations their signs were an orange circle with a white number 76 inside.  The 76 ball, as we called it, had an opening in the front under the numbers and served as a spotter stand, and was a common sight at NASCAR tracks.  And there were trees lining the track outside the walls.

 

Bill Elliott battles Rusty Wallace

What still remains since the first time we went to a race there is a press box, which sits outside the wall at the entrance of turn 3, and usually has a network TV camera on the roof during the races for a good view of the backstretch and the turn, and even occasionally us standing on our platforms up against the fence in the infield.

I remember as a little kid seeing a huge dust devil one year between the backstretch grandstands and the trees and thinking it was a tornado.  The track property was not the impressively landscaped monstrosity it is now.  There was a lot of dirt and very little grass.  I used to use an ice scraper to dig out my own racetrack in the dirt in the infield, banked turns and all, and have my own races with my Matchbox cars.  One year a reporter from the Marietta Daily Journal took my picture during one of these Matchbox races and put me in the newspaper.  I was actually upset when they started growing grass there because the dirt made for much easier racetrack building.

 

From the looks of it, this was me racing my matchbox cars at a scale version of Darlington!

But the clay ground in the infield meant an absolute mess when it rained.  After a while, before the track ramped up their landscaping efforts, we actually laid our own grass seed in our reserved spots at the March race, and would come back in November to a nice green lawn and no mud!

In my opinion, the racers and the cars were much tougher back then.  But despite what a lot of people say, the racing was not better back then… at least most of the time.  Sure, the cars were tougher to handle, and like I said the drivers were grittier, but you don’t have to dig too deep in the statistics to find races in the 80’s when there were only a handful of drivers on the lead lap.  In fact, I know of at least one in the ‘80s when Dale Earnhardt was more than a full lap ahead of second place when he took the checkers.  Today is a totally different story.  There are times when drivers will get a big lead, but it almost always ends up being erased before the end, and most of the best and closest finishes we’ve seen have been in the last ten years.

The newer and improved Atlanta Motor Speedway is simply a sight to behold.  In fact, just driving up to the track and seeing it in the distance is one of my favorite parts of race weekend.  But I do have to say that every time I go to a race there, I can’t help but picture the track when we saw it the first time.

Three of the best ever at Atlanta

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: Crossed Flags, 15 Days Left!

by Mike Fuori on Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 3:39pm ·

#15: The Storm of Nov 2000- The Night I Almost Slept in the Infield Bathroom

Many of the most vivid memories we have from the past 25 years at AMS unfortunately involve the weather.  With races in March and November (beyond about 10 years ago), Atlanta race fans really got the raw end of the deal several times, especially in the ‘90s… key word being “raw”.   If you used only race weekends in the 1990’s at Atlanta as data for a climate change study, you’d be screaming at people to head south, because it seemed to just get colder and colder.  I couldn’t remember the year, but after looking back at weather data, I found that it was the November 17-19th, 2000 race weekend when we experienced the most miserable weather of all our trips to the track.  Remember when I said I almost slept in the turn 3 bathroom?  Long story...

On Saturday afternoon, a mixture of light rain and sleet began to fall at the track, as temperatures hovered in the mid-upper 30s. The rain was intermittent and light through the evening hours, and temperatures remained steady in the 35-38 degree range.  We all decided to go to sleep, so my dad, cousin and friend Dave got in our tent, and my dad’s friend Mike and his son got in theirs.  Long time friend Stan and his son slept in the back of their van as usual.  We managed to fall asleep despite the cold and the tapping, crackling sound of rain and wind hitting the tarps we had draped over our tent to stay dry.  Attached to our tent is a folding canopy (like you see at outdoor events), with makeshift walls made of tarps that are attached to the canopy top with large memo-clips (yeah, the ones in your desk drawer) and bungee cords.  This was mostly to keep some heat from our kerosene heater from escaping, but also to keep all our food, cooking equipment, TV and other items dry.  Sometime after midnight, I woke up, as the rain was now getting heavier and louder when it hit the tarps.  Then, I kept hearing this snap and ping sound as the wind started to pick up, and realized it was the memo clips popping off the canopy and the tarps.  Not good.  I got out of bed to find Dave in our “living area” under the canopy, trying his best to keep the tarps up.  I woke up my dad and we started helping out.  I remember turning on my weather radio, being the weather nerd I am, and listening to the robotic NOAA radio broadcast, and hearing “current temperature at Peachtree City (the closest site to the track) is 35 degrees with heavy rain.  Um, yeah that sounded about right.

Based on the data I found from that night, it says winds never got higher than 12mph.  I beg to differ.  Our friend Mike’s tent had been blown up against the fence after he and his son decided to sleep in their truck.  It was windy.  At some point, we remembered that our bags of clothes where sitting underneath the canopy, and they were now pretty much soaked, as the memo clips continued to snap and the bungees stretched out in the wind.  The canopy was basically a big sail at this point, but my dad and Dave stood on lawn chairs and tried their best to hold the tarps up to block the rain from coming in and keep the canopy from flying away.  As they stood there with rain pouring off the canopy, down their arms and into their faces, my cousin Greg and I grabbed all our clothes and anything else important and threw them in the cab of the single cab truck we came in.  Once all that was safe, my dad and Dave gave up, and we just let the storm have its say.  This meant we couldn’t sleep in the tent though, because it was soaked and unprotected from the wind… and it was freakin’ cold.  So my dad decided to throw a tarp over our truck bed viewing platform and sleep underneath.  At least it would be dry.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think Dave toughed it out in the tent.  Greg and I only had the cab of the truck left as an option.  Again, it’s a single cab and now it has all our clothes in the passenger side… so we had to try to sleep sitting up, me in the driver’s side and Greg in the middle.  Again, still cold, but at least it was dry.  Unfortunately, the clothes we were wearing were not, and since sleeping bags weren’t possible all we had was one blanket.  The temperature remained a steady 35.  Greg and I were freezing, so we both got out and ran to the bathrooms because they had heat and hand dryers.  At least we could thaw out for a second and get our hands warm, maybe dry off our clothes a little.  This is the point we seriously considered going back to get our air mattresses and bringing them to the bathroom to sleep on the floor.  We almost did it.  Instead we went back to the truck.  Greg fell asleep, and gradually spread himself out on the seat, pushing me up against the door as I lay awake, still.  Somehow, I eventually fell asleep for a while, and woke up in the morning with my face pressed up against the window and Greg comfortably laying in the seat next to me.  There was still a light rain.  It stopped by early afternoon, but the track was soaked, and the race was postponed until Monday, so on top of that miserable night, we didn’t even get to see a race, since we all had to go back to work or school. 

The best part of the whole thing though was after we’d all woken up Sunday morning and dried everything off and put everything back in place, Stan got out of his cozy, warm and dry van and told us, “ I heard all you guys last night and saw you trying to keep the tent up and the tarps from blowing away and saw all the rain… and I thought about coming out to help you but I laid there and thought… what can I do?”  Gee, thanks.

Stan will never live that down.

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:06pm ·

#16: Davey Allison Signing Autographs

Davey Allison was the son of NASCAR legend and Hall of Famer Bobby Allison.  In the late 80’s he began to make headlines of his own, winning his first race in his rookie season in 1988 in the #28 Texaco Havoline Ford.  The next season, he finished second behind his dad in the Daytona 500 in one of the most memorable moments in NASCAR history.  Davey was a natural talent… every bit as good as his dad was, and could have been even better.

One night after practice was over at Atlanta, it was either November 1991 or one of the race weekends of 1992, we all walked over toward the garage area to peek through the fence and watch the drivers bring their cars into their garage stalls.  Back then you could actually wait outside the fence and see the drivers walk through the gate and out into the crowds as they walked to their motor homes or to their rental cars to head to the hotel (not all of them had a cozy place to stay in the infield like today’s drivers do).  Most of the drivers would stop and sign a few autographs as they were walking through the crowd.  But that night Davey Allison, who was very popular by then, came out of the gate and stopped walking.  He said as long as everybody got in a line, he’d stay and sign autographs as late as he could.  I can’t remember exactly how long, but we were in line a long time.  He must have stood there and signed more than 100 autographs.

Now ever since my dad came home with a plastic Ricky Rudd toy car, I was a diehard Ricky Rudd fan.  At one of the road course races the year before, Ricky was running second behind Davey when he made contact with Allison in the last turn, spinning him out.  Rudd took the checkers first, Davey second, but NASCAR took the win away from Rudd, saying that he intentionally spun him out, and gave Allison the win instead.  This was the only time NASCAR had ever taken a win away from a driver, and it has never happened since.  I was, and still am, very bitter about it.

So as I stood in line, little old 11 year old me was thinking of a way to play a joke on Davey Allison.  I had my Ricky Rudd Tide Racing hat on, and I was going to walk up to Davey Allison and say, “I guess you wouldn’t want to sign this hat, would you”.  Well I got up to him and froze, hesitating as I handed him my hat and then pulling it back.  I don’t think he heard whatever I mumbled, so he said to me loud enough to make a few people laugh, “well what do you want me to do, sign your forehead?”  He signed my t-shirt, thanked me, and I walked away.

It was totally in fun, and looking back at it I just laugh at how stupid I was.  But I’ll never forget all the time he took to sign autographs for the fans that night.  Davey Allison was on his way to a legendary career, nearly winning the championship in 1992, but we lost him the next year after he crashed his helicopter at Talladega Superspeedway and later died in the hospital from his injuries.  I have no doubt in my mind that Davey Allison would have made it very difficult for Dale Earnhardt to win his sixth and seventh championships in 1993 and 1994, and he might have been the dominant driver during the rest of the 90’s instead of Jeff Gordon.  We only got to see him race five seasons before we lost the one of the greatest drivers that ever could have been.  So the fact that he stood out there in the infield and signed my t-shirt that night will always be one of my fondest memories of race weekend in Atlanta.

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 3:47pm ·

#17: A New Track, a New Track Record

In 1997, Atlanta Motor Speedway underwent a major transformation.  Speedway Motorsports, Inc. had already added grandstands, improved all the facilities and changed the name of the track, but between the March and November events that year, they actually changed the shape, size and orientation of the track.

Atlanta International Raceway, as it was called in the old days, was a 1.5 mile “fat” oval, with long turns and relatively short straights for a track of its size.  The new Atlanta Motor Speedway is a 1.54 mile “quad-oval”, with the start-finish line now on the north side of the track instead of the south side.  Our infield spot was now in turn 3 instead of turn 1.  Essentially, they kept ¾ of the track the same, but added two dog-legs to what used to be the backstretch, and made that portion of the track the front stretch.  And, they repaved the whole track.  The result was the fastest track on the series schedule at the time.  In qualifying for the Cup race that weekend, Geoffrey Bodine set the track record at nearly 197.5 mph.  And that first lap with all 43 cars side by side at full speed was insane.

Go to a race, and I promise that first lap will blow you away, and you’ll be hooked.

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 2:50pm ·

#18: The Meteor Shower

This has nothing to do with NASCAR except that we were at the racetrack when we saw the most incredible meteor shower we’ve all ever seen.  One of the guys, Justin, mentioned to us before we went to sleep that there was going to be a major meteor shower at something like 3am.  Some of us decided to get up and see if we could see any (after all, 3am is right about the time we all somehow either end up needing to go to the bathroom or waking up from being freezing cold every night), and all of a sudden, we started seeing a meteor every 5-10 seconds or less.  Some of them were close enough that they were huge and you could see the tails behind them.  None of us expected it to be that cool.

So we all stood there looking up at the sky at 3 in the morning, pointing every time we saw one and when there was a good one, you’d hear us all say “woah! Did you see that?”  Then after a while we thought… we must look pretty stupid standing here with our heads up staring at the sky and pointing and saying “woah” like we were doing our best Keanu Reeves impression.  I can’t imagine what it looked like to the people in the infield who had been drinking beer for the last 12-24 hours, or at least the ones who hadn’t passed out yet.