[Flyin Ryan]

The reason for all the 1.5s is (per a Humpy Wheeler interview once) it gives you the best balance of maximizing the number of fans that can watch and they can still see the full track unless you're one of the guys that bought seats in the bottom 5 rows.

There is a disconnect between what NASCAR markets itself as and what it really presents, and the Texas race was very much what they don't market. The problem for NASCAR is they don't want to be perceived as a sport for rednecks because they want to be marketable nationally and to sponsors, but their biggest highlights is stuff like rough-and-tumble at Bristol plus big crashes at Talladega.

There's nothing they can do about it now. Even the repavings won't do much. They're locked into their schedule with how the series' dates are distributed to ISC and SMI and the only way they'll change is when lack of ticket sales at existing dates dictate it and ISC or SMI decide to move the date "in house", which is not a good solution either.

The cars are very aerodynamically sensitive for speed but that means on anything over a mile, it's not in your interest to bump and grind. Although I think a lot of this is overstated, you can watch a NASCAR Winston Cup race from Michigan in 1992 and they didn't bump and grind then either. What has changed from 1992 to now is we have better drivers, better teams, more well-prepared cars, and a few dates on the schedule have been taken from rough-and-tumble tracks and gone to smooth big tracks with little car-on-car interaction such as Texas, Fontana, Kansas, etc.

Changes from '92 schedule to now:

Gone: 2 x Rockingham, 1 x Atlanta, 1 x Darlington, 2 x North Wilkesboro

Added: 1 x Phoenix, 1 x Las Vegas, 1 x Fontana, 2 x Texas, 2 x Kansas, 1 x Indianapolis, 1 x Kentucky, 2 x Loudon, 1 x Chicagoland, 1 x Homestead

1. 7 more races on the schedule (from 29 to 36).
2. All the dates left the Southeast.
3. You look at all the tracks that came on, only three of those tracks predated the 1990s expansion of track building: Indianapolis obviously, Phoenix which already had a Cup date, and the 3rd was Loudon which was opened in 1990.
4. Not so coincidentally, of the dates that came in (removing Indy since it's an anomaly for this discussion) Phoenix and Loudon are the only ones smaller than a 1.5-mile oval, which speaks to how general the new tracks being made were which speaks to the corporate-style building of them done by ISC, SMI, and Penske. No track-building corporation today aims to build a Darlington or Pocono (or an Indianapolis for that matter). Penske when he built Fontana intentionally made it as close to Michigan as he could.