Phoenix International Raceway sits in perhaps the most picturesque setting on the Sprint Cup circuit, a valley surrounded by ochre hillsides and giant cacti. In the evenings, the sunset-tinged sky radiates with color.

Clamber to the top of Monument Hill, the promontory overlooking the race track where fans can buy a general admission ticket for $35, and the natural splendor of the Sonoran Desert and the Estrella Mountains unfolds before you. Remove the speedway and its man-made surroundings, and it looks very much like the kind of place you'd be hard-pressed to survive.

One reason Phoenix is almost universally beloved it because it is so unassuming, because at heart it is still a quirky track built in 1964.

Yes, this is very much the American West, the desert just as you'd envision it -- with rocky outcrops, valley floors covered in sage and mesquite, and small, half-hidden scaly things slithering around in the underbrush. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions and Gila monsters out there, for sure. Given the landscape, you'd seem just as likely to run across Pancho Villa or Wyatt Earp.

The race track, though, is a different matter altogether. Certainly it fits in with its surroundings, its somewhat rustic design consistent with the countryside, its bleacher grandstands and modest suite towers complementing rather than overwhelming the stark environment around it.

But strip away all the geographic references and focus on just that 1-mile, blue-walled oval, and any sense of place begins to dissipate. As glorious as they are, forget the mountains. Forget the desert. Forget the rattlesnakes and the Gila monsters. Remove all the tangential qualities, and you finally have the essence of what makes Phoenix great -- the fact that this could have been a track built 60 years ago, in the middle of NASCAR's heartland.

Make no mistake about it, this is a big-city speedway. Standing atop Monument Hill, looking away from the race track, the skyscrapers of downtown Phoenix and the area's bulbous silver football stadium shimmer in the heat-haze. More than 4.2 million people live in the region, making it the sixth-largest market that NASCAR visits each season.

From a track perspective, the starting point for NASCAR's expansion into major cities might well have been Bill France Jr.'s decision to award a race to Buddy Jobe's desert raceway for the 1988 season -- a decade before Las Vegas, Homestead-Miami, California and Texas came on the scene, and the national push began in earnest.

And yet, to look at it, a large base of potential ticket-buyers is about the only thing Phoenix has in common with its big-city brethren. From a facility standpoint, the track is far from a showpiece. Its sea of bleacher seats affords all the creature comforts of a high-school football stadium.

It's been upgraded over time, with the addition of newer grandstands and suite areas and lights, but it will never be as overwhelmingly large as Texas or as glitzy as Las Vegas or even as sparkling as California. And you know what? That's fine. One reason Phoenix is almost universally beloved it because it is so unassuming, because at heart it is still a quirky track built in 1964, because you could plop the thing down in the middle of the Carolina piedmont or the north Georgia mountains and no one would blink an eye.

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That's your first reaction upon seeing Phoenix International Raceway -- what is this old South race track doing in the middle of the Southwestern desert? Aren't big cities supposed to have bland or predictable tri-ovals surrounded by 150,000 seats? Not Phoenix, which is an ideal 1 mile in circumference, which features four corners that are all different, which includes a bend on the backstretch dictated by the terrain. It has a refreshingly modest 76,812 grandstand seats.

It's the kind of place Harold Brasington might have built, or Lee Petty and Curtis Turner might have stopped by on a weeknight between Martinsville and Spartanburg. The founders, who built the place primarily for open-wheel competition, inadvertently constructed a masterpiece of a traditional stock-car track in quite a nontraditional locale.

This weekend, Phoenix stands out for another reason. All three championships in NASCAR's national divisions could be clinched in the desert, a week before the season ends. Ron Hornaday can lose two points off his lead in the Camping World Truck Series, and still clinch on Friday. Kyle Busch can wrap up the Nationwide title Saturday if he finishes with a 195-point advantage. And Jimmie Johnson needs to gain 122 points -- roughly the difference between first and 34th, not including lap bonuses -- Sunday to secure his fourth consecutive Sprint Cup crown.

In any of those instances, NASCAR will hold a "soft" celebration with photos and a trophy presentation, but delay the official crowning until the next week in Homestead.

But in all honestly, Phoenix doesn't need such window dressing. Certainly, the track would like to see those events unfold, and play host to an almost unheard-of triple-early-clinch. Yet the desert oval stands on its own merit, bringing with it the kind of anticipation that typically precedes events at places like Bristol or Darlington, because it is quirky and different and fun.

Could it use a few more chair-back seats and a more spacious media center? Undoubtedly. But in between those blue walls, everything is perfect. Drivers and spectators both look forward to Phoenix's arrival on the schedule, a true rarity for a track west of the Mississippi.

Despite those tall buildings off to the east, the place feels traditional. Despite its relatively recent addition to the NASCAR schedule, the place feels old-school. Despite its location, the place feels somehow connected to tracks like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro, much more so than its neighbors in Las Vegas and greater Los Angeles.

Phoenix's meandering design makes it feel a little like a Darlington of the West, somehow appropriate given that it was Phoenix that took one of the South Carolina track's races in 2004.

Yes, that's right, Phoenix. People tend to get so caught up in the Labor Day move to Southern California that they tend to forget that it involved only a calendar spot -- Darlington actually held onto two race weekends for another year, until NASCAR and International Speedway Corp. realigned the schedule and shipped the original incarnation of the Southern 500 to Phoenix.

Looking back on it now, it almost appears kismet. After all, one architect had to adjust his backstretch for a cactus-covered mountain, and the other had to accommodate a minnow pond.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.