2018 NASCAR Cup Series

[Purist]

I'd say the long course is at least even in terms of racing; you might actually get one extra, conventional overtaking spot per lap. Given how liberally they use that extra pavement on the outside of the short chute from Turn 4 to T7, T4 itself isn't really an overtaking point anymore. You might see some outbraking into there now, with guys still being a bit off-balance coming out of the left/right sequence of Turn 3. The Turn 7 hairpin is a good zone, as you'd expect. Also, the Turn 5 sweep and crest just before T6 could put some drivers out of sorts, leaving scope for an opportunistic move there into the Carousel.

In addition, I think the road course racing in NASCAR has improved generally quite a bit since the last race on the original layout back in 1997.

The 3 recent IndyCar layouts aren't applicable. They used shortened versions of the Turn 11 hairpin. They also used the motorcycle chicane at Turn 9. They used the traditional layout of the Turn 7 hairpin in 2005-07, but then started mucking about with that, and didn't really improve the racing by doing that; they mainly just increased the likelihood of spear-jobs into T7 by running them straight down the dragstrip for the entry into T7 itself, rather than using that road that angles off to the left to give a slightly more open entrance to the corner. Using the 2.52-mile layout, IndyCar probably would have been averaging 130 mph for the pole this year, not 110 mph on their 2.385-mile variant of the course.

There are various reasons NASCAR did the roval at Charlotte. I'm sure they want to keep the July race at Daytona under the lights, and the infield doesn't have the lighting like the oval does. It's also a restrictor-plate race. Furthermore, there have been all the complaints about too many 1.5-milers on the calendar, so they found a convenient way to reduce that count by one.

On top of that, I wonder if they would have been worried about being able to make a tire that was compliant enough to navigate the Daytona infield, while also being durable enough to take the loads on the banking as fast as they'd get going; this would be especially important to consider for the cars as they went through the tri-oval section. Tire loading was one of the reasons I'm sure that was given for the old IMSA dropping the Charlotte roval after 1986, and came up very prominently again in the ALMS race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2001, when one of the factory Corvettes in the GTS class blew a right-rear coming off of Oval Turn 4.

Finally, I think the long course at Sears Point is likely to work better for Cup than Watkins Glen would with "the Boot", because at the Glen, you'd then have that one comparatively enormous straight for the whole lap, and then just another 3-5 "short" straights the rest of the way around. With this change at Sonoma, you now have a third "long" high-speed stretch to work with to set up an overtake, to go along with T11-T2 and T7-T11.