I watched the first two heats of the SRX season finale last night before the dog, high on the sedative the vets gave us to keep her from jumping around while the stitches from her spaying heal, wouldn’t stop barking at me, necessitating a car ride down to the river (which she barked and growled at) and back, during which we missed most of the main event (she did not appear disappointed). It was my first time getting to watch SRX, and I was struck by how much the track was part of the story.
Growing up, I went to the races here and there. My granddad took me to Grundy County Speedway at least once. My dad’s factory had its company picnic at Rockford Speedway a few years for something called the Budweiser Night of Thrills. But I didn’t grow up around racing. I’m very much not a knowledgeable racing fan. I’m learning more by blogging about it and watching it, but a lot of this stuff’s new to me. And I was struck, watching SRX last night, by the importance of these short tracks on which SRX has raced.
The premise of SRX is that it’s a bunch of superstars racing each other. They cross ages (from up-and-coming to long-retired), they cross series (NASCAR, IndyCar, etc.), and while it’s not an exhibition, entertainment is the purpose. The stars are the purpose. The idea that seems to sell the tickets is that you can see Tony Stewart and Hélio Castroneves race on a short track against Michael Waltrip and Bill Elliott and half a dozen other stars and a couple local (or local-ish) faces that rotate each week. But there’s another star, and it’s cliché, but it’s the track. These tracks are the stars.
It was striking, watching the camera pan down the front stretch as the first heat went green, how much the actual track at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway reminded me of the quarter-mile in Rockford and the third-of-a-mile in Morris. Plenty of differences, of course. I get that. But the basic premise of a short track was the same. And it was striking, later, watching Chase Elliott speak about winning after we’d gotten back from the car ride and watched the last five laps and the puppy’d gone to sleep at my feet, how much these short tracks mean to guys, seemingly especially in NASCAR, where there seems to be a real reverence among a lot of drivers for these tracks where auto racing built and builds itself in America.
There’s an aspect of auto racing where because of the sport’s decentralized nature (is it even just one sport?), you can start with one series and dive deeper and broader and uncover more and more. A lot of that is the short tracks, the hundreds of short tracks, where the sport’s roots are most concentrated, people racing each other because they like cars or like to race or both, like a pickup basketball game but requiring so much more commitment and therefore producing so much more of whatever the thing is we love so much about sports.
I don’t know if that was a goal of SRX—to open the short track door to people who didn’t know about them, or people who rarely thought about them. But that’s what it did for me. Excited to see what the series does next year.
