After watching the multi-groove Bristol race Saturday night, I couldn't be more dissappointed with the new configuration. It's not that I want to see wrecks, it's far from that; However, I do like to see tough racing like we all grew up with in Saturday night specials at your local bull ring. Bristol was the one track that always had those beginning traits of NASCAR built into it's personality.

The track looks like a shorter Dover and might even be worse than that. The long green runs made Bristol look like a cookie cutter mile and half track. In this age when they have made most of the tracks look the same, they have vanillafied the circuit. Long gone are the great side by side races at Rockingham, Bristol, and even Darlington has only one date.

This week coming up should be the Southern 500, but instead we'll get a three-quarters full California Speedway that seats 80,000 on a nice wide open cookie cutter track. For some reason that is the price we all pay as the sport grows huge Nationally. 

I'm sure the drivers all like the new tracks because they aren't as demanding, but at some point NASCAR/ISC and SMI should get together with some fans and find out what they like. Apparently, the fact that the fans spend millions upon millions on their sponsors products like no other sport and hundreds for a single ticket doesn't grasp their attention as it once did 20 years ago.