Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Concrete Bristol’s return creates questions about NASCAR’s dirt future

BRISTOL, Tenn. — NASCAR’s three-year experiment with a Cup dirt race is over and Bristol is back to hosting two races on the concrete

But was last season the final time that Cup races would run on dirt or could they return in the future?

“I don’t think we should go down the path of having one dirt race a year,” Christopher Bell said Saturday at Bristol. “… Whenever you have that single event, it becomes easy to overlook and then people don’t take it seriously.”

Bell said if NASCAR wants to go put Cup cars on dirt, it should hold two or three events so that it becomes a priority on the schedule. Teams would have to put more emphasis on the races.

“We saw that in road course racing early on in the sport,” Bell said, “where if you weren’t a good road course racer, you would just kind of put it behind you and it was easy to put it behind you, and ‘Well, on to the next one.’

“The dirt race was very much that same way. For all of the teams that didn’t have a dirt driver, it was just kind of an off week for them, a throw away event.”

Excessive tire wear led to a track-record 54 lead changes and much discussion of what drivers experienced.

Bell’s road course comments were in reference to the Cup days when Sonoma and Watkins Glen were the only road courses on the schedule. They mattered far less in the championship story than they do in 2024, especially with two road course races moving to the playoffs.

Bell is one of the many drivers in the garage with significant experience dirt racing, and he is the winner of the last dirt race at Bristol. This list of dirt drivers also includes Austin Dillon, Tyler Reddick, Chase Elliott, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Chase Briscoe, Alex Bowman and Kyle Larson.

Some of these drivers are supportive of the concept of bringing back dirt to the Cup schedule at some point. Briscoe, in particular, said that NASCAR tests every discipline of racing other than dirt and that there is an important crossover for the sport.

Briscoe agrees with Bell about the number of dirt races – to a point. He would prefer to max out at two dirt races each season instead of adding too many.

“I think it would lose its luster if we did more than two (dirt races),” Briscoe said.

There are drivers in the garage that are supportive of putting Cup cars on dirt — just not at the expense of Bristol concrete. They prefer the tradition of the .533-mile Tennessee track.

NASCAR held three Cup races on the dirt at Bristol Motor Speedway between 2021-23.

Other drivers have become far less supportive of the idea after three years of the Bristol Dirt Race.

“No,” Larson bluntly said when asked if he would want to see multiple dirt races on the schedule or even a return of Cup cars in a one-off event.

Bowman agreed with his teammate, saying that the Cup car just did not put on a good show on dirt.

“I think it’s a car designed to race on pavement, and we should probably stick with that,” Bowman said. “I think if (NASCAR) want to get us all together and go race dirt cars somewhere, I think that’s a great idea, but I think this car belongs on pavement.”

Unlike many of his peers, Todd Gilliland did not grow up on racing on dirt. He has not completed laps in a proper dirt car and his first dirt start was in the Truck Series.

Gilliland can’t make comparisons with NASCAR’s dirt races like Bowman, Larson or Bell. What Gilliland can do is describe how he felt sliding the Cup cars around.

“I think it’s safe to say these cars definitely don’t handle properly,” Gilliland said. “I think that’s kind of what makes it fun.”

While Denny Hamlin celebrated the win, Brad Keselowski enjoyed another top-five finish.

Josh Berry shares this sentiment. He said that he had a lot of fun in his lone start in the Bristol Dirt Race last season, which he made while replacing an injured Elliott. It was something “so new and so different.”

Though Berry still prefers Bristol concrete.

Should NASCAR decide to bring back dirt to Cup, there is a belief among some drivers that it should not be at Bristol.

Briscoe and Bell both listed Eldora Speedway as a potential venue though Briscoe acknowledged that many dirt tracks don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to hold a Cup race. Gilliland said there are multiple tracks that hold dirt races each week, ones that could help NASCAR put on a better race.

“I think the legacy (of Bristol dirt) was we’re not afraid to fail,” Brad Keselowski said. “The sport’s willing to try new things. I think that’s good. I don’t necessarily think that the dirt race was a failure. I think there was some success out of it.

“I think it would be a failure the more you do it. It makes sense to do special events in a limited time window of two to three years. And it ran that course.”