For both participants and spectators, the road to Bristol Motor Speedway is a circuitous one. Competitors travel across the country and back, dodging crashes and controversy on a series of big ovals where high speeds can lead to white knuckles on the steering wheel. Fans traverse winding mountain highways with tunnels and overlooks, and the occasional stretch of roadside netting to protect against rock slides. And yet when you finally get there, when that great big cereal bowl of a race track emerges in that valley, next to a hill that was half blown-up to accommodate it, the journey seems more than worth it.

• Purchase tickets

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I think our fans will always get their money's worth, no matter how wide or how narrow it is.

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-- CLINT BOWYER

That's the power of Bristol. No offense to the other fine racing venues on the Sprint Cup circuit, but there's only one Bristol, and race fans look forward to its arrival on the calendar like a schoolchild looks forward to Christmas. Be it an overcast late-winter afternoon or a hot summer night, the place just has an aura about it, even with no people in the grandstands and no cars on the track. It envelops you, it overwhelms you, it fills first-time visitors with that strange and wonderful combination of anticipation and awe. So many sports venues seem smaller and less grand in person than they appear on TV. Bristol, like Augusta National and Fenway Park, is among the few that exceed expectation.

And it could not arrive at a more perfect moment. No question these are tense, trying times for NASCAR, with so much focus on attendance figures and television ratings, with the doctrine of "have at it, boys," under immense scrutiny, with fans debating the fairness of rule changes and the effectiveness of the sport's penalty system. Those issues still will be there, well after the team transporters have left the concrete half-mile on Sunday night. But in the meantime there is Bristol, with its devoted fans and its 55-race sellout streak and its physical, short-track action. The place is a 160,000-seat testament to everything that's good about NASCAR, a concrete and steel shrine to all the things about major stock-car racing that so many people hold dear.

It has its challenges, just like everything else in the sport right now. There are legitimate questions about whether Bristol can extend its sellout streak to 56 races, given the depth of the recession in the Midwestern region from which the track draws so many ticket-holders, and the fact that last year's March race wasn't announced as a sellout until race weekend. There still were plenty of good seats available as of Tuesday. Perhaps not coincidentally, track officials recently extended the Steel and Foam Energy-Reduction (SAFER) barrier 84 feet exiting Turns 2 and 4, a move that will narrow those areas by 3 feet, and perhaps quiet complaints that the racing at Bristol has lost some of its character since a 2007 resurfacing that made the race tack surface a little wider. (Continued)