NASCAR makes changes, and Bristol pays the price

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Poor little Bristol deserves so much better than this.

It's been good to NASCAR, it really has. It's given the sport its most compelling competitive venue. It's proven that with the right combination of aggression and theater, Nextel Cup racing can thrive even in the kind of remote, Southern setting NASCAR is moving away from. It's shown that day or night, despite sometimes snow and ice and always a dearth of decent hotel rooms, 160,000 souls will unfailingly make their twice-yearly pilgrimage to the hills of eastern Tennessee.

• Send David your thoughts

And this is how it gets treated. By serving as guinea pig for a new type of vehicle that, however commendable the intentions, sucked much of the life out of Sunday's event at Bristol Motor Speedway. This on the heels of last year's fall race, usually a fiesta of frayed nerves under the hot lights, which the looming Chase for the Nextel Cup turned into a sit-in by cautious drivers scared at missing out on a title.

Now there's the Car of Tomorrow, which made its debut Sunday in a Food City 500 full of drivers fighting tight vehicles that only wanted to travel in a straight line. It's a noble effort to develop a racecar that in theory makes the driver safer, costs less and equalizes competition. But what a shame that venerable Bristol, the toughest ticket on the circuit, had to host a rolling science project rather than its typical Nextel Cup event.

Even the winner was disappointed. "From my perspective," Kyle Busch said, "it wasn't a very good race."

Sure, there were 14 lead changes among 10 different drivers, and David Ragan's fourth spin of the day forced a green-white-checkered finish that spiced up the end. But Bristol races have always been about drama and action, two things notably absent from Sunday's race. Just as they were absent from last year's fall event, where cautious leaders wary of Chase contention drove as if their cars were made of glass. Two duds in a row at Bristol is not what 160,000 people pay to see.

Not everyone agreed. Runner-up Jeff Burton: "I didn't think the race was any different [Sunday] from the race we had last year. That's my point of view. I may be wrong, but from my point of view, it seemed like just another race at Bristol." NASCAR VP for competition Robin Pemberton: "Probably 99 percent of the time, you have really good races here. From the tower, I thought it was a good race." (Continued)