In North American auto racing, particularly with regard to NASCAR, a short track is a racetrack of less than one mile (1.6 km) in length. Short track racing, often associated with fairgrounds and similar venues, is where stock car racing first got off the back roads and into organized and regulated competition. Many traditional fans and purists still see short track racing as the "real" NASCAR, because the lower speeds make "paint swapping," where the bodies of the cars actually rub against one another, practical without a very high likelihood of serious accidents. In fact, NASCAR sanctions such "club" racing, offering the Whelen All-American Series as a national championship for the drivers, and an invitational race for club racers. In 2007, NASCAR is increasing marketing of the short tracks with the "NASCAR Home Tracks" campaign, with Greg Biffle, Elliott Sadler, and Carl Edwards featured in advertising to market short track racing. In some cases a Sprint Cup star or two will race in a weekly short-track event held usually on a short track near that week's race, or in a midweek special, such as the Slinger Nationals at Wisconsin's Slinger Super Speedway, a quarter-mile track (but is not NASCAR-sanctioned).
Ken Schrader, Tony Stewart, Dave Blaney, Scott Wimmer, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. all own short tracks, most of them being dirt. Stewart owns the Eldora Speedway, which features Sprint Cup stars and other nationally recognised drivers in the "Prelude to the Dream" dirt late model race. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is a partner in the Paducah (Kentucky) International Speedway.
In recent years, there has been a gradual push away from short track venues for Sprint Cup (the highest level of NASCAR) in favor of longer tracks. This is due to larger venues having accommodations for more fans (although the short track in Bristol, Tennessee, Bristol Motor Speedway, now has over 160,000 seats) and higher speeds.
Famous quotes containing the words short, track, motor and/or racing:
“The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“The motor idles.
Over the immense upland
the pulse of their blossoming
thunders through us.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)