BRISTOL, Tenn. — Last season Bristol Motor Speedway showed the NASCAR Cup Series teams a couple of very different looks during the circuit’s two visits to the challenging half-mile in the Northeast Tennessee hills.
In the spring, teams faced a tire-management situation like they hadn’t seen on the concrete high-banks in quite some time. Denny Hamlin was able to figure out the puzzle quickly and scored a victory. Every driver said they had fun in the race and the fans loved it too.
In the fall, Kyle Larson and his crew set his No. 5 Chevy for maximum speed and ripped around the bullring like the old saying that is often used to describe racing at BMS, “like a fighter jet getting turned loose in a gymnasium.” Larson led a whopping 462 laps and won the race by a full seven seconds over his closest challenger.
As teams sit down to discuss which Bristol they are likely to see at the Food City 500 Sunday, a few crew chiefs and drivers are still scratching their heads. Will it be the tire-management chess match, or the wide open showtime fast-break speed show.
“This is the magic question of the weekend for the race teams,” Austin Cindric said. “The decisions are made today for the cars and they are packed away and done before we have any data from the track this weekend. Some of it has to do with the temperature. This weekend will teach the whole garage a lot about kind of what’s going on with the tires, the track and the prep.”
Hamlin will try to go back-to-back at Bristol’s spring race and also claim his third consecutive victory on the season. He is riding some momentum in the No. 11 Gibbs entry with wins the past two weeks at Darlington and Martinsville. Hamlin says he’s expecting the same super-fast Bristol that we saw last September.
“I would expect that we would have the normal Bristol (this year), where your tires don’t wear that much, if it’s the same tire,” Hamlin said “Temperatures look to be up, so I would say that we would have kind of the normal Bristol that we’ve had most of the time.”
The one thing that is certain: every team will have to face the same challenge, no matter what it is. And that’s always what makes Bristol Motor Speedway fun.
Speaking of fun, Larson is set for his second trifecta attempt of the season. After coming up one race short at Homestead in mid-March, Larson will try to sweep the weekend by competing in the Craftsman Truck race, the Xfinity race and the Cup race. Only Kyle Busch has turned that hat trick in the past, and he has done it twice, both coming at Bristol, his first in 2010 and second in 2017.
“Hopefully we can go there and be fast again and control the race like we did last fall,” Larson said. “Even if it doesn’t go that way, I feel like our car is good enough to run up front. I just hope we can contend for a win and that will be great. We will give it our best shot and try to execute to the best of our ability in all three divisions.”
Another storyline to watch is Jesse Love making his Cup Series debut at the controls of the No. 33 Chevy for Richard Childress Racing. Love also will be competing in the Xfinity Series SciAps 300, where he drives the No. 2 Chevy full-time for RCR. He said it was the perfect fit for him to make his Cup debut at the iconic .533-mile oval.
“I love concrete, the fact you can run multiple lanes and the steep banking, I enjoy all those things about Bristol” Love said. “When I look at how intimidated I was the first time I was there, I have really come a long way to love Bristol and now it’s one of my favorites on the schedule.”
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