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.

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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.

Will that bring some of the old Bristol back? "I guess so. If they are hoping for more crashing, then maybe," said five-time Bristol race winner Jeff Gordon. "I mean, I think the racing has been spectacular. I love the fact we are able to get three-wide there now. We are certainly racing side-by-side. It is just that there is a little bit more room to race on. You see more side-by-racing, I don't think that is a bad thing. But [fans] want to see sparks fly, and this might be the thing that does that."

"It is going to narrow it up," added Clint Bowyer, who finished sixth at Bristol this past August. "It seems like the fans, they like the emotion, they like the beating and banging on each other and having to knock somebody out of the way to pass them. I'm a big fan of the way the surface is right now. I like being able to run side-by-side, being able to race your way around somebody. Bristol has always been one of my favorite race tracks, no matter before they repaved it or after they repaved it. I think our fans will always get their money's worth, no matter how wide or how narrow it is."

That's the thing about Bristol -- even at its worst (relatively speaking), it's still so much more entertaining than so many other venues on the tour. In March 2008, at the height of unrest over what had become of a race track once renowned for beating and banging, we still had a finish where Kyle Busch slid into the wall, Kevin Harvick shoved Tony Stewart out of the way, and Denny Hamlin ran out of gas. No, it wasn't quite as epic as that crazy night in 2002, the single greatest race of the past decade, that ambulance-punching, shoe-throwing, bird-flipping bonanza that ended with Gordon pulling the bump-and-run on Rusty Wallace to win. But that's like going to a St. Louis Cardinals game and watching Albert Pujols hit for the cycle. It's not going to happen every time.

So yes, maybe Bristol does suffer a bit relative to its own history, and maybe its somewhat remote, rural location does work against it in difficult economic times when potential ticket-buyers might not have quite as much disposable income in their pockets. But even with all that, Bristol's importance to NASCAR is impossible to overstate; this circular race track has become something of a cultural crossroads, a place where past and present, old fans and new markets, tradition and future all blend into one deafening mix. Here is an old Southern short track that has morphed into a major sports attraction, an Appalachian venue that draws so many fans from states like Pennsylvania and Indiana and Ohio, a place with roots in grease-stained, bare-knuckled racing that instantly appeals to fans old and new.

Let's be very honest -- even though one driver has won the past four championships, the level of competition on NASCAR's premier series today is clearly better than it was in the perceived golden era, when the differences in cars from one team to another could be staggering, and margins of victory were often calculated not in seconds, but in laps. So why was the racing perceived to be so superior? Maybe because rather than a somewhat tedious collection of tri-ovals, the circuit visited slick, cantankerous places like Darlington, Rockingham, North Wilkesboro, and the old Nashville fairgrounds track twice every year, in addition to Bristol, Dover, Richmond and Martinsville. Maybe at heart this isn't a competition issue at all, but a yearning to go back to a circuit dominated by tight, quirky places that fueled such high levels of intensity and chaos.

That's unlikely to happen, given that the most any track can hope for is two NASCAR weekends, and that more modern facilities need to be big enough to attract a more diversified collection of racing series. The great loss in the abandonment of potential track development in metro New York, Denver and Seattle wasn't necessarily the expanded geographic footprint, but the fact that at least two of those facilities likely would have been a mile or less in length. Had one of those communities been more welcoming, NASCAR might have been on the brink of a throwback facility every bit as revolutionary as Camden Yards was to baseball in 1992. Now, the most likely expansion candidate is another 1.5-mile tri-oval in Kentucky.

Which brings us back to Bristol, that high-banked bullring that reminds everyone of how great NASCAR was and how great it can be. Yes, the place might very well fail to attract a full house for the first time since 1982. Yes, they've tinkered with it a bit. But in a sport where fans and competitors alike love to complain about everything, nothing is more beloved than this short track in the East Tennessee hills. Amid hard times, amid overriding economic concerns and difficult questions about direction, nothing soothes the soul like a trip down those winding roads back to Bristol, where for one weekend, at least, everything will seem just fine.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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