Down in the Pits: Loudon the worst track in NASCAR

By Bernard Smith / Columnist

SMITH

Last week marked the start of the second-half of the NASCAR season. The race was held in Loudon, New Hampshire, which in my humble opinion is the sorriest track on the NASCAR schedule. This is the same track where two years ago Kyle Petty’s son and Winston Cup driver Erwin met their death when they hit the wall while practicing.

The New Hampshire track is flat as a pancake and was never designed to race stock cars on. Giving the promoter the benefit of the doubt I will say that he tried to widen the track and put down a new surface. It not only did not help, but in the long run, it hurt.

New Hampshire has never been anything but a one-lane track and it never will be. The new surface only accounted for a lot of wrecks. The track was a one-groove track if that, and I say it that way because most of the people never found out where that one groove was. The pavement in turns three and four started coming up during the course of the race and caused a lot of problems. This is an old worn-out track that isn’t worth the price of admission. It seats about 100,000 people, all of whom are seriously starved for a good stock car race but they haven’t ever seen it run at that track.

All of the above was the good news. The bad news is the Cup series returns to this same track on Sept. 15. You can bet on one thing: That is one day I’ll watch pro football or even a golf tournament if it’s on, but I darn sure won’t be watching another race at that sorry track.

NASCAR only licenses tracks year to year. This would be a perfect time to dump this one and move on to other places such as Texas and California.

Every driver has his favorite track. I’ve heard Kyle Petty complain about Dover and Bristol saying that both of those tracks should be filled up with water and stocked with fish. That was all they were good for. And of course as I said before, I have never heard so many different drivers complaining about one racetrack as last week at Loudon. Some of the drivers feel that the Brickyard is an outdated track — at least where the facilities are concerned. However they have no problem with the racing surface.

Fans are just like the drivers. They have their favorite tracks. My favorite three tracks are number one Bristol, (which is also the number one choice of all the NASCAR fans polled), number two Charlotte, and number three Talladega. Now as far as the accommodations for the media, you’ve also got to throw Las Vegas in this mix. I hope you noticed that three out of four of those tracks just mentioned belong to Bruton-Smith.

Now for the three tracks that I like the least: number one is New Hampshire, number two and three are the road courses. I believe that’s probably the way most of the drivers would rank their least favorite tracks if they weren’t good road racers. Tony Stewart recently made some disparaging remarks about Talladega, but I don’t believe that’s the way he really meant. Now I know that Tony says what he thinks, but I think Tony was talking about all of the hell-raising that goes on in the infield. It’s like a zoo down there, even in the parking lot and the camping grounds. The nice part about it is that there is no zookeeper and I thoroughly enjoy the shows myself.

Oh, by the way, I went to West Palm Beach this week and was looking for Jeff Gordon’s house. You know the 10,000 square foot, $9 million mansion on the beach. Of course those people don’t post their names outside the house, but it wasn’t hard for us to figure out which one it was. As my wife and I drove by one of the houses she said, “I think that’s it.” I said, “How can you tell?” She said, “There’s a lot of clothes piled in the driveway.” Enough said. In Tennessee that means the sucker is gone.