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.
All over the country there are some kind of cars racing on dirt. Modifieds, entry level stocks, sprints and, of course, the cross country and off-roads. The return to an “earth” surface for a NASCAR premiere series was as much a test of the drivers as it was for the show. The chassis of the NCWS trucks is essentially the same as the running gear for Nationwide and Sprint Cup. They have spent 30 years finding ways to make them stick to pavement and, in doing so, made an “all in” situation on the track. When they go loose, they generally go all the way.
Put this heavier chassis on dirt and you loose the specifics and a big chunk of useful power and control. It proved to be a mid-week spectacle at Eldora. Tony Stewart thought it would be. NASCAR folks were hoping it would be. The numbers proved it was with ticket sales and broadcast viewers. The consensus seems to be there will be more to come in 2014.
Pre-race chatter was putting an advantage on drivers that came up from dirt track beginnings but practice sessions showed that drivers who had little or no dirt in their history caught on fairly quick. Typical dirt oval racing, with cars built for it, offer sideways power slides through the turns. Drivers with a dirty past had to grapple with heavier machines that can’t hold a slide while drivers brought up on paved tracks had to get used to a looser style. Both were coming to grips to find grip which may have leveled the field from practice to checkered flag.
The race itself offered everything fans, and officials, wanted to see. Drivers wrestling with too much power brought out close racing, bumping, banging, slides and spins. Slingshot passes diving low and sliding up to pass brought fans out of the seats.
At the end of the evening the win came to Austin Dillon. Ken Schrader started on the pole but was caught up during the race and finished 14th. Notable also was Timothy Peters, starting 3rd and leading for some of the early laps, came in with a solid top-10 finish to follow his win in Iowa. Kyle Larson, who also lead a good chunk of the race, finished in 2nd with Sprint Cup veteran Ryan Newman rolling over in 3rd. Joey Coulter and Brendan Gaughan rounded the top 5.
The Camping World Trucks will return to the dirt. It is a good fit. Nationwide or Sprint cup, while there is a lot of chatter about it and some polls show fans would like to see it, will likely not. At least in the foreseeable future. The trucks make it work as their showroom counterparts are often put to work in dirt. Farming and construction is a common environment for the trucks. Racing on dirt offers a challenge for drivers and a novelty for fans. For “stock car” racing, let’s leave the dirt to the weekend warriors and modifieds that run sideways because they are built to run sideways.
The race at Eldora gives the Camping World series a bit of its own identity and with it something for fans to rally behind.
Dirt. Trucks. Race. Yes.