A trip to Eldora is something you won’t immediately forget
Rossburg, OHIO – Eldora Speedway stays with you.
It’s visible on your clothing, which looks a lot different and dirtier when you see it in a well-lit area. It’s visible in the sink and shower when you look down and see the streaks of dust that have turned into mud when combined with water.
Oh, and you’ll always remember the experience too.
Wednesday night’s Camping World Truck race won by Christopher Bell was our first trip to the speedway. And if you’re a NASCAR fan wanting to make a tour of tracks, you have to put Eldora on the list.
If you’re used to frequenting tracks with local racing and lower regional or national series, the Eldora experience may not stand out extraordinarily. But when judged against the context of NASCAR races, it’s certainly unique.
While Martinsville is quaint and a different experience from an intermediate track, it’s still clear the entire time you’re in attendance that you’re at a Sprint Cup race. At Eldora, if it wasn’t for the trailers behind the turn three and four grandstands with the NASCAR logo or the haulers in the infield, you wouldn’t have much indication.
The grandstands on the frontstretch now have bars behind them. And by bars, we mean full-service bars that wouldn’t look out of place at your local dive. The prices may be better too. Beer is $2. Shots are $3.
The main concession stands are similar to a cafeteria line. You walk in, grab what you want and pay at the cashier. The hot cheese balls are a gut bomb. But worth the roughly $2 we paid for them. And if you’re not wanting the cafeteria experience, you can always get the state fair one.
And that doesn’t only reference the food. Where else can you see a mower that is outfitted like a winged sprint?
The merchandise is something else too. You can buy shirts of your favorite NASCAR drivers, an Eldora t-shirt splattered with screenprinted mud or something like this if your daughter is a race fan.
When you walk up to the track and see the trucks for the first time, it’s a race experience that isn’t outstanding. In fact, it’s almost disenchanting.
The trucks can’t be driven like a car set up specifically for the dirt. They simply don’t have the same consistent pitch – where drivers dive the car in to the left and steer to the right through the corner – to get into and through the corners that dirt cars utilize to go fast. The lack of pitch is visible on television, and incredibly clear in person.
It means the trucks are pretty slow. The lack of speed isn’t necessarily a bad thing (especially as we talk about how to make better racing in the Cup Series), but it makes you wonder just how entertaining a race would look like.
The heat races didn’t do much to change our opinion either, despite our awesome view from inside turns one and two. WIth six or seven trucks on track at a time, the races quickly got single file and we’d probably only want to watch one again.
But man, the race is a spectacle. What one truck or seven trucks can’t accomplish, 32 can. Any doubts about how the race would be to watch are erased in the first few laps as you’re enveloped in the dust cloud from the track. Watching trucks attempt to slide into the corners three or four-wide, only to learn it won’t work time after time is mesmerizing.
(We also won’t deny our laughter when this truck the first spin of the night. It felt like an appropriate analogy.)
We spent most of the evening on Brad Keselowski’s radio. He too was making his dirt track debut. Listening to his learning experience helped accelerate ours. He stayed out at the first caution to inherit the lead but quickly learned how valuable new tires can be on dirt as faster trucks with fresher tires passed him with relative ease.
The battle for the lead over the race’s final segment was fantastic. And we wish it could have gone green to the end. Bobby Pierce, an 18-year-old dirt-tracker making his first NASCAR start for a team that hadn’t ever gotten a top-five in the Truck Series, let alone a win, was faster than Bell over the last 25 laps, even with a decklid that was hanging on just by the tethers from hitting the wall so much.
But restarts were Pierce’s demise. He had radioed his crew that his transmission was getting harder to shift as the race went on and the split-second he’d lose entering turn one was always enough to prevent him from getting around Bell on the race’s final two restarts.
Even if the race wasn’t thrilling, the trip to rural Ohio was worth it – and we’re not just saying that because we went to the Maid Rite in Greenville. Much like Martinsville, Eldora is a throwback. And not only is the Truck Series racing more entertaining there than at, say, Texas, it’s a much more real and in-your-face experience too.
If NASCAR ever wanted the Truck Series to get closer to its founding roots of the mid-1990s (yeah, right), it simply needs to look at what goes on Wednesday night to see how consistenly fun the races can be.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
