Oh, Canada. Every year you do this, cramming the grandstands at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and turning your annual Nationwide Series race into a chanting, flag-waving extravaganza of motorsports goodwill. NASCAR's venture into Montreal has been so well-received by spectators and competitors alike that it's easy to believe a Cup Series event added north of the border would go down about as easily as an ice-cold Labatt's Blue.

By now, we all know the reasons why it shouldn't happen -- the Sprint Cup schedule is maxed out as it is, and there are already tracks lined up to try to squeeze more dates out of a slate that's packed full between Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving. But this is about the reasons why it should happen, and Exhibit A is a Montreal road race that in four short years has grown to become arguably the Nationwide tour's second-biggest event behind the season opener in Daytona.

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If you had guys up there like Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and people like Richard Petty walking around, I would assume the fans would be very, very excited about that.

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-- CARL EDWARDS

No question, it was all by design -- a cosmopolitan, big-city backdrop, a storied venue, a scheduling slot on a Sprint Cup off week, a road race that gives more Canadian drivers opportunities behind the wheel. Pieces were very carefully set in place. But the fans still had to turn out, and they have. This isn't Mexico City, where over the course of four years attendance plummeted by almost half. With the exception of the rain-plagued event in between, the crowds at Montreal have remained a steady 68,000-plus from year one to year three. Kentucky Speedway landed a Cup event for drawing as much.

But this is all bigger than one race. This is about NASCAR's Canadian Tire feeder series drawing strong crowds to places like Saskatoon, Sask., or Vernon, B.C. This is about Kyle Busch being invited to sign autographs at a race track in London, Ont., and attracting a horde of fans decked out in M&Ms and NOS jackets. This is about some of the biggest attractions at January's Canadian Motorsports Expo outside Toronto being Matt Kenseth and the show cars of Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This is about a branch of the NASCAR fan base that for years has watched races on television, and is just yearning to be let in on the big show.

"It's kind of funny," said Greg MacPherson, co-owner of the Canadian Motorsports Expo and publisher of a monthly Canadian racing magazine called Inside Track Motorsport News. "I think in the cities where the big agencies are, it's still very much hockey-centric. But you leave the cities, and you see the guys with their pickup trucks with the 88s and 24s on them. [NASCAR drivers] are huge stars, and they draw. People up here know who they are. It's just funny that the marketing people are a little slower to catch on to that. It's like this rural secret that Toronto hasn't caught onto yet."

To a certain extent Montreal has helped pull back that curtain, with the volume of Canadians in the field -- five are on the entry list for Sunday's event -- providing the event with a geographic foothold. MacPherson wonders if that could be replicated in a Cup race, given how few drivers at NASCAR's highest level turn their cars over to specialists or locals for a road-course event. But Carl Edwards, the winner of last season's race, still has the singing from Victory Lane ringing in his ears, and believes a Cup race in Canada would be a huge hit.

"The fan presence is there, the race track and the city are just fun to go to," Edwards said. "It's a fun place to stay. It's a fun track to race on. The problem is the politics and the money and the contracts and all those things. To me, the Canadian fans, it's like going to Kentucky or going to Iowa, these places where they love their stock-car racing and they want to see these races and it's a change of pace for them. They're amped up. There's so much energy there ... I was standing in Victory Lane, and we'd just won this race last year, and the crowd was singing in unison. They were singing songs. I'd never seen anything like that. If you had guys up there like Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and people like Richard Petty walking around, I would assume the fans would be very, very excited about that." (Continued)