New generation, new attitude at road courses

SONOMA, Calif. -- Mark Martin learned to race much like the moonshiners did, tearing down the hilly, curvy dirt roads of his native rural Arkansas, trying to keep his car out of the ditch. That experience paid dividends once he moved into NASCAR's premier division, where despite an oval-track professional background, he took to road courses like a natural -- as his four career victories on the twisty circuits would suggest.

Yet among his contemporaries, Martin was something of an anomaly. In a sport once dominated by former late model drivers raised on circular short tracks, road course races were almost a necessary evil, something to be tolerated more than embraced. They set their jaw, gritted their teeth, and did what they had to do to get to the next oval. A cottage industry sprung up among road course specialists, who could take the burden off regular drivers unable or unwilling to turn their cars right as well as left. A trip to a place like Infineon Raceway held all the appeal of a visit to the dentist's chair.

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Not coincidentally, the winner usually came from a small cadre of drivers, men like Martin or Jeff Gordon or Rusty Wallace or Ricky Rudd, competitors who saw the twice-yearly visits to road courses as an opportunity rather than an ordeal. When Jeff Burton first came to Infineon Raceway, back when it was known as Sears Point, his team brought a car that was seven years old. With no Chase, and most of the field out of the championship running by summertime, road course races simply didn't merit the level of attention dedicated to events on more familiar and more popular oval tracks.

"Today, it's a little different than that," Burton said. "I think teams have put more emphasis on building specific road course cars. Engineering has been applied to it. Drivers have looked to be better. So I think there is more effort. But there is more effort to go to the Daytona 500 too, than there has ever been. ... I think the improvements [on road courses] have come quicker than they have, because we haven't been doing this long. At the end of the day, I think that the realization, especially with this point structure, two of the 26 races that count are road course races, and you have got to be good at it. If you aren't, you are giving up something." (Continued)