Trucks.

Trucks racing on dirt.

It certainly sounds normal. After all, trucks have been running rally and off-road in all sorts of competition. This time was a bit different…

These trucks don’t have long travel suspension or skid plates. These aren’t the trucks from the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series . These are NASCAR chassis sanctioned for Daytona and Dover, Martinsville and Michigan. These are the Camping World Series trucks and they ran on dirt at Eldora in Ohio.

Tony Stewart (Sprint Cup Champion / Stewart-Haas Racing) owns the facilities at Eldora and worked with NASCAR to bring the trucks to town. The only real mod on the trucks from their last race at Iowa were box-grooved tires. The surface of the track is hard-pack clay, dimpled a bit with special equipment and periodically moistened and re-set.

The combination made for a slick return to dirt track racing for a NASCAR premiere series. The first since 1970 when Richard Petty won at the fairgrounds in Raleigh, NC. (more…)