In The Know – bristol dirt
Ready to get dirty? The Food City Dirt Race is back! For the second straight spring race, Bristol’s concrete has been covered with dirt. Get up-to-speed on everything you need to know as the Gen 7 takes to the dirt for the first time this weekend at Bristol Motorspeedway.
The Details
NASCAR Cup Series Overview
● Event: Food City Dirt Race (Round 9 of 36)
● Time/Date: 7 p.m. EDT on Sunday, April 17
● Location: Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway
● Layout: .533-mile, high-banked, dirt oval
● Laps/Miles: 250 laps/133.25 miles
● Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 75 laps / Stage 2: 75 laps / Final Stage: 100 laps
● TV/Radio: FOX / PRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
The BROADCAST
Let’s kick up some dirt. You can watch all the action from Bristol Dirt on FS1.
SHR FAST FACTS
Kevin Harvick:
Kevin Harvick has made 41 career NASCAR Cup Series starts at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, but all of those have come on the concrete surface of the .533-mile, high-banked oval. Despite three wins, 14 top-fives, 21 top-10s and 1,209 laps led at the track since 2001, none of it matters this weekend in the series’ return to Bristol. For the second straight spring race, Bristol’s concrete has been covered with dirt, and Harvick’s past accolades have been buried. The Food City Dirt Race is back.
Aric Almirola:
Almirola started his racing career on dirt. He raced go-karts at Dirt Devil Speedway in Land O’Lakes, Florida, which was built and owned by his grandfather Sam Rodriguez, who was a well-known dirt Sprint car racer. Not only did Almirola start his racing career on dirt, he learned valuable lessons about how to operate a dirt track from age 11 to 18.
Almirola arrives at Martinsville eighth in the driver standings with 223 points, 65 out of first. He advanced three positions from the previous race weekend.
Chase Briscoe:
This weekend, Chase Briscoe, driver of the No. 14 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang, returns to his roots. The third-generation dirt racer from Mitchell, Indiana, looks to capture his second win of the season in Sunday night’s 250-lap event. While Briscoe scored a 2020 NASCAR Xfinity Series victory on Bristol’s traditional high-banked, concrete surface, he hopes to be the first to conquer the Last Great Colosseum in the NextGen car in the Cup Series’ only dirt race this weekend.
Briscoe cut his teeth racing on the dirt tracks of Southern Indiana, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. His first time behind the wheel of a racecar came in 2001 driving a quarter midget. He won his first heat race and then won the feature event later that evening. Briscoe moved on to mini sprints and, when he was 13, stepped into a 410 sprint car, in which he finished 10th in a 40-car field in his first race.
In 2008, Briscoe made 37 starts in a 410 sprint car, racking up eight top-five finishes and 17 top-10s, including a win in the last race of the season at Paragon (Ind.) Speedway. With that win, he broke four-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon’s record as the youngest to win a 410 sprint car race. Upon besting the NASCAR Hall of Famer’s record at the age of 13, Briscoe said, “It was pretty special to me to realize what I’d done, but I know I have to keep working. I don’t think about it a whole lot. I just go out every time like it’s just another race to try and win.”
Cole Custer:
Sunday night’s 250-lap race around the .533-mile, dirt-covered Bristol oval will be Custer’s 84th Cup Series start and his fifth at Bristol. The 24-year-old from Ladera Ranch, California, started 21st and finished 24th in last year’s inaugural Food City Dirt Race, the first Cup Series event held on dirt in 50 years.
The 2020 Cup Series Rookie of the Year was no stranger to competing on dirt in a NASCAR event when he arrived at Bristol last spring. He drove the No. 00 JR Motorsports entry in the 2015 and 2016 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series races on the half-mile dirt oval at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, owned by SHR co-owner Tony Stewart. He qualified 24th and finished 29th in the July 2015 race, then came back a year later to finish sixth from 23rd on the grid.
OUR WEEKLY WRAPS
These schemes won’t be clean for long. Check out the wraps. we’ll have at Bristol Dirt.
What Our Drivers are Saying:
Kevin Harvick, Driver of the No. 4 Busch Latte Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing:
We’re back to the dirt at Bristol. With a year of reflection, how did that first dirt race at Bristol go for you?
“You know, Bristol Dirt was much easier than I anticipated it being because it wasn’t like a normal dirt race. I was expecting a normal dirt race, but when you look at Bristol Dirt and the way the cars drove, it was a lot of the same tendencies that you had with a normal Cup car. Being able to have all my stuff and all of the same tendencies just made it a lot better for me, even with all differences of racing on dirt.”
Aric Almirola, Driver of the No. 10 Cummins/Rush Truck Centers Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing:
Talk about your dirt racing background.
“Growing up, I went to the dirt track to watch my grandpa race dirt Sprint cars, so that’s all I knew – scraping mud off of racecars. When I was growing up, my grandfather was always making fun of people who raced on asphalt. He said asphalt was for ‘getting to the racetrack.’ Then when I started go-kart racing, all of the racing was on dirt. It was a very different discipline and so that’s what I learned from. My grandpa actually built his own dirt go-kart track, so when I was 11 all the way to 18 years old, I helped prepare the track every single weekend there was an event at his track. I was very familiar with watering, grading and prepping the track and everything that was needed to go into making a good surface for the weekend. I have a lot of memories from starting on dirt, but as I started to stock-car race I transitioned to asphalt. My grandfather was a firm believer that if I was going to make it in NASCAR, I would need to become a great asphalt racer because he thought dirt racing would teach me bad habits. It’s been a long time since I’ve done much dirt racing. Before last year’s Bristol dirt race, I think the last time I raced dirt was the Prelude (to the Dream) that Tony Stewart hosted. I think I have eight total races in a racecar on dirt. I’ve had mild success at that.”
Chase Briscoe, Driver of the No. 14 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing:
Do you have any solid expectations for this weekend’s Food City Dirt Race based on last year’s race and returning this year in the NextGen car?
“I don’t really know what to expect, just because I’ve never driven a car that has this type of suspension on dirt. So how it drives on dirt and what you feel is probably totally different than what I’ve experienced. The other big component is the tires. The sidewall is so much shorter and stiffer than what we had before, from a side-bite and lateral grip standpoint. It’ll be totally different how the car reacts and the grip level that you have compared to anything I’ve raced. But we’ve got a couple of practices and heat races to figure it out.”
Cole Custer, Driver of the No. 41 Jacob Construction/HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing:
What do you think will be the key to running well on the dirt this weekend?
“I think it’s going to be important to get through your heat race good and kind of start your race off good because, if you start behind, it can definitely kind of throw you for a loop, and then you’re kind of fighting and maybe you do something that you don’t want to and you get yourself in a bad position. I think the heat race is important, and then it’s going to be a lot about attrition. I think just staying clean is going to be one of the biggest things, and not making mistakes and just being there at the end, because there are going to be a lot of guys who do make mistakes and it’s going to be a matter of limited mistakes. Last year, it was a lot to take in, being our first time on dirt there. And this weekend, we wipe the slate clean going back with the NextGen car.”
BREAKING DOWN THE DIRT CAR
How do we prep the cars for some dirt racing? Crew Chief of the No. 14 HighPoint Ford Mustang, Johnny Klausmeier, shows us what’s different on the car this week for Bristol Dirt.
TAKE A BREAK WITH BUSCH LATTE
It’s not a commercial break. It’s a coffee break. Busch Light, or rather Busch Latte, is bringing the notion of a coffee break to NASCAR during the Food City Dirt Race Sunday night on FOX. During every commercial break, Busch Light will encourage fans to tweet using the hashtags #BuschLatteBreak #Sweepstakes. One winner will be selected from all the entries after each stage, and that person will be able to order a prize off the Busch Latte Menu. Each stage will have increasingly bigger prizes: The Stage 1 “tall” prize menu = Busch Latte merchandise (T-shirt, coozie, mug); Stage 2 “grande” prize menu = Choice of a Busch Latte cooler, a Busch Light neon sign, or two tickets to an upcoming NASCAR Cup Series race; Stage 3 “trenta” prize menu = $1,000. So take that coffee break, we mean, that #BuschLatteBreak.
