HOLLYWOOD, Fla. -- In its 13 seasons, the Craftsman Truck Series has created a comfortable niche on the motorsports landscape.

The series that proudly displays what many call the best racing in NASCAR plays to smaller crowds -- both live and on television -- than the Busch Series, billed as America's number two racing series and NASCAR's premier division, the Nextel Cup Series.

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Depending on whom you poll, you'll certainly get an opinion on whether or not it's "NASCAR's hidden gem." And while some agree it is and some don't, everyone's ready to discuss it.

Truck Series director Wayne Auton has a deep family legacy in NASCAR racing and is the Truck Series' only director. He agrees the series performs somewhat under wraps.

"I believe it is a hidden gem, because if you go and watch the races, the drivers just get after it," Auton said. "The races are short enough to where the drivers can't sit back and wait, yet they're long enough for strategy to come into play.

"We only have a few races that are 250 miles in length, so if you sit back at the green flag and wait for 200 miles to pass before you go, you're going to be way back at the back. The big difference is, I think, that the competitors just want to win -- that's what it's all about.

"We have a good mix of drivers, with veterans, some young drivers and some middle-aged drivers that are trying to maybe get back over to our major leagues, which is our Nextel Cup Series.

"But all in all it's a good mix because the veterans know they can't sit around and wait on the rookies, because the rookies are going to beat on them to get to the front. And then the veterans go, 'If they're going to dish it out, we're going to give it right back to them.' "

Team owner Jack Roush has maintained a commitment to the Truck Series that goes back virtually to the series' beginning. A couple of his best developments, 2004 Cup champion Kurt Busch and former Truck and Busch series champion Greg Biffle, got their starts for Roush in trucks.

Two of his current Cup standouts, 2007 Busch champion Carl Edwards and Jamie McMurray, also started in trucks, though not with Roush, who ran two teams this entire season and is in prime position to assess the series' value.

"It certainly lacks something, and maybe that's just gestation time," Roush said. "It's great racing, it's a great format that saves a little money from the expense that goes with running a Busch program or a Cup program; with fewer tires and shorter races."

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For 2008, NASCAR is looking at further cutting costs by putting rules in place that will increase engine life. Ron Hornaday, who this season became the series second three-time champion, instantly and vigorously reacted to that news as a direct threat to his Kevin Harvick Inc. team's competitiveness.

"If the Truck Series is that good, why are they going to ruin it?" Hornaday said. "They're going to slow us down with gear rules and [carburetor spacers] to take 75 or 100 horsepower out of them, where at most of these tracks we run wide-open now.

"We'll try it -- we'll see if we can still maintain that standard we've had over the years for competition. Here we are in 2007 and it's gotten better every year, so I'm not the one to judge NASCAR, because everything they've done is class act, always works and always puts on good shows."

While Roush supports the series, he doesn't want to see the schedule expand much beyond 25 races, if at all.

"I believe with the schedule, if they included more races, but if we did that, we'd have to make more money for the teams, to be able to pay for all that. The money is behind and the participation, the viewership and spectatorship is not what it should be, but hopefully that will all get itself fixed over a period of time.

"The Busch Grand National Series wasn't 10 years ago what it is today, and the Truck Series has gained in stature and relevance and importance and I think , in appeal every year that it's been there -- it's just fairly new."

"We're real happy with the Truck Series," NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France said. "It's one of our three national divisions that we're real, real proud of. A lot of people think it is some of the best competition that we have. They obviously had a very tight point battle that came down to the last event [at Homestead]."

The series, which was born through a series of demonstration events in 1994 before it staged its first season in '95, has always traded off its "tough trucks" persona. Its format, with shorter races and fewer pit stops, creates an atmosphere in which competitors are more apt to get after it than play a strategic game of chess.

Kevin Harvick built this season's Truck Series championship team, Kevin Harvick Inc., with his wife DeLana because his career lacked a Truck Series victory, and he felt he'd never had the equipment with which to do it right.

Obviously, with KHI's first title coming in the trucks, the team's namesake has strong feelings about it.

"I think truck racing is very entertaining," Harvick said. "It has a lot of drivers, crew chiefs and crew members that are just flat-out burned-out on Cup racing. They don't want to go Busch racing, but they still want to race.

"So in a sense it's just a lot of racers that want to race. You can get away from some of the politics and things you have on the Cup side. To me, it's the best racing that we have in our sport right now -- for whatever reason, I don't know.

"But shorter races are the ticket. I think we should have the Daytona 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 and those should be our longest [Cup] races of the year -- the rest of them should be 500K. Six hours is a long time to sit there, by the time you get done watching the pre-race and the race and the post-race: That's a long time to expect someone to sit there."

His wife agrees when it comes to Truck Series philosophy.

"If you look at the schedule and you look at length of the races -- they're just right," DeLana Harvick said. "Sometimes you sit through these Cup races and they drag on and they drag on. Truck races are just long enough that these guys can't go out there and ride around -- they're racing, and every position counts, because these races are so much shorter.

"They can't ride around for 200 laps, they've got maybe one to two shots at adjusting their truck and getting it right and I think that makes it pretty interesting. I just think the talent level is there and SPEED does a really good job promoting the series."

SPEED president Hunter Nickell, who took over the leadership role of the Truck Series' flagship network last spring, is ecstatic over the series, the public's acceptance of it and the network's role in its development.

"I wouldn't say it's hidden, because first of all it's the highest-rated racing series on SPEED," Nickell said. "We've seen growth every year in key aspects of viewership -- every year. It's a series in which SPEED has had all the races for the last four years.

"This year, for the first time, we had two races on the FOX network, with the rest on SPEED; and that will be the way we'll go for years to come. So it was cool to have two races on the network to boost the visibility of the series even more.

"And for us at SPEED, it's not scientific. This series is a blast to cover: The competitors are awesome, the racing's awesome; and that's why this year we added more practice and qualifying coverage than ever and we had a full year of the set-up show -- the pre-race show.

"We've got more stuff coming for next year, which we're not ready to announce, and more ways to try to get more people to check it out, because we feel like if they check it out on SPEED, they're going to keep coming back.

"If we can help NASCAR and the series, and the track promoters to get more people to check it out in person by watching whatever we do, then they're going to come back to those races and they're going to watch when the race moves on to the next town; and we're totally committed to doing that because more tickets sold is going to mean more people watching -- and we're committed to that."

That fits well with NASCAR's vision for the trucks, whose shape and style, France said, had a major influence on NASCAR's future.

"Frankly, that's one of the things, when we looked at the Car of Tomorrow, we noticed that the obvious things that create some of this great racing are the aero issues," France said. "[The trucks] don't have some of the [aero] challenges that the Busch Series or the Nextel Cup Series has with aero dependency.

"They go a lot slower because they're pushing a lot more air; so to get back to that kind of racing was one of the things we looked at when we looked at the Car of Tomorrow."

One thing the Truck Series has maintained, along with its rough edges from flag-to-flag, is a real family atmosphere in the garage area; a juxtaposition that smacks to its core of "old school NASCAR."

ThorSport Racing team manager David Pepper hasn't missed a Truck Series event since the 1998 season opener -- a streak of 247 consecutive races.

"I've looked forward to every single one of them," Pepper said. "Because I can walk the garage area, or pit road or wherever you are, and you can say 'hi' to people -- people are friendly and you know things about their lives and what's going on in their lives.

"You can walk into any hauler you want -- even if it's not yours -- and there's nothing that's a big show about it, you genuinely care about the people and you can tell they genuinely care about you.

"As far as the racing on the track, every driver, crew chief and crew member says it's some of the best racing in the country -- and it really is. You never know who's going to win from week to week and they'll beat and bang [on the racetrack] and the minute you're done, you're in the inspection line together having a cold beverage.

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt it's like old school NASCAR racing, because you can race everybody real, real hard and the minute it's over, you can leave the racetrack or barbecue in the infield or have beers together and it's not some taboo thing: 'If I get seen with that person it might jeopardize something.'

"People are genuinely excited to go racing, but to also make friends that will probably last a lifetime."

Auton, who began his NASCAR career in 1979 at Hickory Motor Speedway, a venerable short track with lengthy NASCAR roots, likes that comparison.

"If you look at the point at which we are today, it is like old school racing," Auton said. "The trucks are boxy enough that they can take a little bit of punishment, the drivers are smart enough that they can dish out a little bit of punishment -- or take it -- and still keep going forward.

"So from the history of the series, racing on short tracks in 1995 to getting to Daytona, where we've twice had three-wide finishes for the win, and at Talladega, with the same thing: No other series has ever done that; and we've been fortunate enough that with the aerodynamics and the durability of the trucks, makes it able for the guys to really go at it."

"And we've given them a little bit of leeway, too, as long as they don't get too out of control," Auton added, with a wink. "We've been fortunate to have the green-white-checker finish in the trucks since 1995, and every year it seems like we set a new record for the number [of such finishes] we're going to have, and that makes it exciting for the fans."

Series PR director Owen Kearns, who'd made every race since 1994's demonstration events to nearly the end of 2006 when he missed a couple due to illness, knows what the series has to offer.

"We get a lot of families with children at our events, and that gives our track operators an opportunity to introduce the sport to fans who might not see it otherwise," Kearns said. "For the Ford Championship Weekend I believe Homestead had a deal for our race in which kids got in free with a paying adult.

"So in a lot of cases, customers are seeing the most exciting racing of the weekend at a budget price, and there's nothing wrong with that. The Craftsman Truck Series really took off as we went to more combination events with the Nextel Cup Series.

"The fans of that series are our most avid fans, and the combination races exposed them to the Craftsman Truck Series, and as a result, the Truck Series has become more broadly popular as well."

Roush has always used the trucks for nurturing drivers, and thinks that's still a positive for the series.

"To get any rookie driver in a Busch car or on his way to a Cup program, to go through the Truck Series is a logical first step," he said. "The best thing they've taken out of the Truck Series is just learning how to deal with people that want to race just as hard as they do and want to win as much as they do, in vehicles of that weight.

"You have to figure out what you can expect and what you can require and what you will yield and have that be acceptable to the greater number of people and what will get you enough for your sponsors. It's just a matter of how much you can take and how much you have to give, and it's a good place to figure that out."

Plenty of veteran talent has done a good job of that in the Truck Series, including Rick Crawford, one of the series most veteran competitors, with 272 career starts; and 2006 series champion Todd Bodine, who's made 600 starts in NASCAR's three national series.

"Wayne Auton has got the best series I've ever run in, and in the Truck Series it's so hard to compete and to win at that level," Bodine said. "But it's a lot of fun and not too much pressure. Well, wait a minute: The intensity to come back and repeat [as champion] every week is hard, to keep that performance level as high as you expect it to be and as high as it needs to be, to win the championship."

"I don't really believe like it's hidden," Crawford said. "I think the statement of how good the racing is or how highly it's regarded is held by the fans -- it's the fans that are answering the questions and we're just performers on the racetrack.

"We're just entertainers and it's a great place to race, a great place to have fun and there's a lot of drivers out there showcasing their talent that are really relaxed. What a great place to race."

"We've got some guys in the Truck Series that have been in Cup racing and they just want to go out and win," Hornaday said. "They want to be the big fish in the small pond -- and we've got kids out there that want to be the big fish so they can go to the big pond, to be the little fish.

"So it's a good stepping stone and it's a good retirement for whoever wants to race there. For me to say I'm retiring, I can't say when because I just enjoy it so much. The short formats, I don't know what it is, but it just puts on good racing.

"Everybody's got a goal, they've got their own personal goal -- and when the green flag drops in a truck race, fend for yourself because it's wide-open every lap."

Despite missing out on his second series championship this year, Mike Skinner's affinity for the series is still strong.

"The Craftsman Truck Series is awesome," he said. "Everybody that's part of this series is just good, good people -- it's like family when you come over here. We have so much darned fun, and people ask all the time, 'Would you ever go Cup racing again?'

"And I'm like, 'Oh man, I don't know if I want to go over there and struggle.' For me to do that, they'd have to pay me a lot of money, so I'll probably just stay over here in the Truck Series and enjoy life."

Crawford made his first start in 1997 and, before an injury in 2005 interrupted the streak, had made 210 consecutive starts. And he sees it the same way as his fellow veterans.

"I'm over 10 years involved in it," Crawford said. "I used to think of going Cup racing, or running some Busch races, but you don't have to. I enjoy racing in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series: I'm having a great time, I'm competitive, I feel good and I'm looking forward to 2008; after just getting beaten out in the points by a couple guys that had exceptional years."

Crawford, like Harvick, is one of many who thinks the format of the Truck Series is unique and shouldn't be cross-pollinated.

"No, I feel like the elite series of NASCAR is the Cup Series, of course," Crawford said. "And the fans are buying tickets to see a 500-mile race or a 400-mile race or a 600-mile race. They're buying tickets to a Craftsman Truck Series race because we're going to go out there and we're going to get it on.

"I feel like it's a great group to be in and there are a lot of competitors out there [in the series] that are enjoying racing -- so it's not behind the times at all."

And Auton agrees the Truck Series has a solid place in the sport's hierarchy.

"Look at it this way: Other sports have their ladder system to Major League Baseball, the NFL or whatever," Auton said. "NASCAR has the Craftsman Truck Series, the newly-named Nationwide Series and Nextel Cup, and everyone wants to get there.

"But we have people that's been there, we have people that don't want to go back because of all the days that you're gone from your family -- but they still want to race -- and this is a good fit for them. With 25 races that leaves a lot of time to spend with their family, play some golf, ride their motorcycles or go on vacation.

"But is it the hidden gem? I think so because I've got the greatest seat in the world [in the control tower] -- we've had 10 winners again this year, the points have gone down to the last race 12 out of 13 seasons; and [Nextel Cup director] John Darby asks me, 'How do you do it?'

"Well, it's not me -- it's the competitors, the teams the owners, the officials, the sponsors and NASCAR in general. It's just one of those deals that it just fits in this world of motorsports."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.