Changes to track, cars take teeth out of feisty Bristol

With the limitations inherent in the Car of Tomorrow's design, the season's second race at Bristol was uncharacteristically calm. Chris Graythen/Getty Images

After Saturday night's NASCAR's Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway might better be called the Duller 500.

Ironically, by doing everything right, like the repaving and the transitional banking of the half-mile oval, and the tweaks to the Car of Tomorrow, one of the Nextel Cup Series' most exciting events was not much of a show Saturday.

That didn't matter much to Carl Edwards, who said it was the biggest win of his career after one of his trademark back flips off the window sill of his Office Depot Ford Fusion. Then there was Kasey Kahne's return as a true contender for his first win of a disappointing year. Still, the evening left you wanting something more.

To their way of thinking, drivers, such as Tony Stewart, said the track was fun and challenged a television reporter who asked if the race was boring.

"It was fun I thought," argued Stewart. "It is hard to tell what it was like to watch on TV and [for the media] to watch, but from the inside the car it was awesome. You weren't having to root guys out of the way, you could race."

What Tony doesn't realize is that the view from the grandstands or your favorite couch is very different from the view through his windshield. You could see the enthusiasm in his eyes as he toweled away the sweat after being cooped up in his overheated cockpit for three hours on a hot summer night. He appeared genuinely happy with a fourth-place finish on a track that had turned from a one-lane bottleneck to a three-lane roller derby.

But Stewart didn't appreciate that fans have come to expect some good old-fashioned, fender-on-fender out-of-my-way dude action.

Bristol was the site where the usually well-behaved Jeff Gordon shoved Matt Kenseth and earned a $10,000 fine and probation last year. That was his first penalty for bad conduct in a career that started in Cup in 1993, which goes a long way toward illustrating how NASCAR has successfully morphed itself -- actually and image-wise -- from a bunch of hard drinking, hard driving, give no-quarter, take no-quarter, cussing, drivers into corporate, many shades of vanilla, spokesmen.

Because of the physical nature of the race, and flared tempers that often result, Bristol melts away all that media training to reveal the unvarnished side of many of NASCAR's stars. Fans want, and expect, to see their drivers as human beings: funny, sad, happy angry -- in other words real people.

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