Fan's Eye View ~ Has "The Monster" Lost Its Bite?9/29/2014 |
Dover International Speedway. It has been called Bristol On
Steroids. It’s been known as White
Lightning. It’s official nickname is The
Monster Mile. Whatever you choose to
call the one mile concrete oval located in Delaware’s capital city, it is a unique
track and one with a racing experience unlike any other on the Sprint Cup
Series circuit. Dover has a reputation
as a track difficult to turn, and impossible to master. Ask any one of the drivers who over the years
have felt a car snap out from under them and turn around, heading for the
outside wall, only to over correct and have the natural self-cleansing banked
surface of the track kick them down and into the inside wall, ending the
competitive day. Recently, however, some are asking if The Monster, after all
these years, may have finally been tamed.
It is not a difficult chore to determine the reasoning for this
reasoning. Look at the record books. Bobby Allison and Richard Petty, arguable two
of the sport’s most successful drivers, co-owned the record for career wins for
years with seven each. Last September,
Jimmie Johnson broke that record with his eighth win at Dover, and followed it
up in June of this year with his ninth victory.
By the time you read this, you’ll know if Johnson has attained the
magical number “10” in the win column.
Is Johnson that good, or is there another reason that he and his team
have been able to have such success here and minimal disappointment? In the early 1990’s, when I first started coming to see the
races at Dover, they were 500 mile races, and a test
of endurance as much as speed. Longtime
fans may remember that in those final 100 miles and final 100 laps, that there
were often a few engines which would give up the fight for the day as they
could not hold together for that long, or a tire or two that decided not to eat
their Wheaties on that day, and felt a little flat. That last 100 miles often determined who
would win the race, and who would go home deflated, after all, a dominant car
is only as good as it is if it can go the distance. The elimination of those final 100 laps
beginning at the September race in 1997 would, of course, have an effect on the
number of cautions in a race as well, just because there were fewer
opportunities for someone to make an error.
But two years even before that change, another one took place, and the
asphalt surface at Dover was replaced with the concrete racing surface we have
now. As soon as that happened, the
average number of cautions per race dropped from thirteen in the previous four
races to five in the next three races.
Waiting in the wings, however, was the 1996 MBNA 500, in which the
carnage of fourteen cautions was the story of the day until Jeff Gordon crossed
the finish line ahead of everyone else. So, now that Jimmie Johnson has made Dover his personal
playground, and drivers such as Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, and Ryan Newman all
have multiple wins at this track that has been known to bear its teeth at
various points, does that lead us to believe that Dover has gotten bit soft as
it has aged, or do these drivers simply have this place figured out. Well, not to devalue anything any of these
drivers have done over the years, or any other driver for that matter, to quote
one of those famous memes that appear all over the Internet…”One does not
simply” figure Dover out. Obviously
there has to be a winner, and it will be the driver who gets to the checkered
flag first, but that doesn’t mean that there were 400 uneventful laps around
Dover’s 24 degrees of banking. But those high banks have always been there, too. So, you have to ask yourself, what else has
changed? What always changes in NASCAR? The car. Year after year after year, NASCAR has made
adjustments to the cars, and we went from Generation Four, the old Twisted
Sister, to the Generation Five, the COT, and now to the Generation Six car,
with changes made all along the way and still being made. So, those drivers who have been able to adapt
to those changes as the years have passed and the car has evolved are the ones
who have had the most success at the track.
Here’s a shocker to follow that one up, too. Who can adapt better than anyone else? Why, none other than those who have the
resources to do so quickly and most effectively. What does that mean? Look at the winners of
the past races at Dover. When was the
last time a driver without a team mate or team mates won at Dover? How about 1997, when Ricky Rudd won in the
car he owned. So, while the main structure of Dover has
not changed over the years, the surface, the car, and let us not forget the
team resources, have all changed.
Miles The Monster…tamed? Don’t buy that stock yet. Rest assured, Miles The Monster is
still alive and kicking, and lurking just below the surface, waiting to
attack. Maybe once the changes that
NASCAR has in store for the cars in the 2015 rules package will remove some of
that control from the driver, and the Monster Mile will regain its healthy
appetite, and get back to snapping up cars and spitting out parts.
Feel free to leave comments below, and be sure to follow me @RaceFansJim on Twitter, because sometimes I give stuff away!