Tag: TUMS Fast Relief 500

They race everything.

As the “Chase” makes the way back to our part of the world it is only fitting we make one step back and have a look at the other series running in our back yard.

Camping World Series trucks are on tap at Martinsville Speedway coupled with the TUMS Fast Relief 500 for the Sprint Cup.

To be honest, years ago, when they introduced trucks to the NASCAR format we thought they were a bit daft. Trucks pull trailers and haul bricks or lumber or dirt or empty beer cans.

Trucks are torque machines for pulling and hauling. Speed is not generally the way they do things.

However, NASCAR has done a number with the Camping World Series. They took the Cup chassis and essentially dropped a truck on it. The hood is lowered and the windshield is swept a bit and the bed is not really a bed but it works. They are fast. They look like pick-up trucks.

Weird… (more…)

At one of the historic speedways in America, host to NASCAR for 65 years, racing took place with late-model stock cars for a full day of fender scraping, bumper ripping and wall refinishing.

Apparently, the same was going on for the Cup drivers at Kansas…

The Virginia Is For “Racing” Lovers 300 was turning laps through heat races, last chance advances and a main event which left metal and fiberglass stacked on trash bins throughout Martinsville Speedway. A few tempers were scraped along the way, as well.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood Casino 400 was crunching numbers with attrition and battered metal as the Chase was being knocked around the new pavement of Kansas Speedway. A few tempers may have been scraped along the way.

For Kansas, 14 cautions littered the day. There were at least that many for the late-model folks at Martinsville. We suspect there were more… (more…)

There has been a lot of chatter about football lately. The season is just a couple of weeks in without, apparently, the standard issue referees. The regulars are on strike. The fill-ins are, apparently, less than stellar.

No matter, really. The “Chase” is on. How can there be a comparison? Early season football or late season racing? I’ll go racing any day.

So I did, of a sort. Kyle Busch was at Martinsville Speedway to give a brief on the Tums Fast Relief 500. The manner of this briefing was from the cockpit of an M&M’s #18 Toyota Cup Car, modified a bit to carry a passenger. Also suited up was Speedway President Clay Campbell. Clay has his own experiences with driving so he was also on hand to run passenger laps behind the wheel of a Federated Auto Parts #52 race car. The cars were brought up to Martinsville by the folks from Fast Track High Performance Driving School in North Carolina.

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The “Chase Across America” made a stop in Martinsville, Virginia on Tuesday, September 11th, as was the case at Sprint Cup race cities filling the schedule for the remainder of the season.

The “Chase Across America” is one, a NASCAR promotion for upcoming races for the championship. It also gets the drivers out and away from the tracks, closer to the fans and highlights their activities out of the race car.

For example, Jimmie Johnson made rounds in the Big Apple. Brad Keselowski spent some time with firefighters in Chicago. Jeff Gordon did fan Q&A in Phoenix. Drivers were all over the place with causes, fans and fanfare, including Martinsville High School which hosted Greg Biffle and Miss Sprint Cup, Kristen Beat.

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