Time to play some 'home' games
By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
October 3, 2001
3:41 PM EDT (1941 GMT)
Finally -- some of us get to play a couple of "home" games.
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Richard Petty
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Teams in the NFL play 16 regular season games. Eight of them are played at their own stadium. Those guys sleep in their own beds each week. They drive their own cars to the stadium each week. They get a chance to kiss their wives goodbye in the mornings, and maybe a chance to kiss them hello when they get back home that same night.
Major league baseball -- 81 games at home in their own stadium, 81 games on the road. The NBA -- 42 games at home, 42 games on the road. The NHL -- well, I don't know. I imagine it's the same way . . . but you get my point.
Then you get to NASCAR Winston Cup racing. For the most part, it's 38 weekends on the road. No home games.
But the next two weeks is as close as we get. This week, we're at Charlotte Mot -- oh, sorry . . . Lowe's Motor Speedway (I have a hard time with that one since I've said Charlotte for so long) -- and next week we're at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia.
Charlotte . . . Lowe's . . . whatever . . . anyway, that's about a little over an hour's drive from our shops in Level Cross, N.C. It's actually about halfway between Charlotte and Concord, on the northeast side of the city. Martinsville is in Virginia, but it's just over the North Carolina border straight up U.S. 220. It's an hour from our shops.
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Martinsville Speedway
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So we don't have to worry about sleeping in motels. We don't have to worry about airplane schedules or anything else. For two weeks, we get to be at home.
That's a pretty nice feeling.
There was a time we'd run 60-some races a year, and you'd be all over the place. You might run Thursday night at one track, Friday at another and Saturday night at another. You might go outon the road for two weeks at a time.
Sometimes you had little quirks in the schedule where there was a race in New Jersey on Friday night and a race in California on Saturday night.
If you were running for the championship, you had to do more than just run pretty well. You had to take a hard look at the schedule and run as many races as you could.
Obviously, nobody was going to run New Jersey one night and be able to run in California on the next, but you might look at the schedule and say, "Hey, if I go to New Jersey, I can run three races if I schedule this thing right and I can only run one if I go to California."
And a lot of guys would look at it and just say, "Which one pays the most money?" figuring the points would take care of themselves one way or another.
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Mark Martin with his son Matt.
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These days, we stay at a track for several days. But like last week at Kansas City, we left Wednesday evening and got in Wednesday night. We practiced Thursday, practiced and qualified Friday, practiced some more Saturday, raced Sunday and came home Sunday night.
For the crew guys, they saw their wives and kids when they left home Wednesday morning, and maybe got to give them a kiss on the cheek Sunday night after they got home.
With these two races, they might be able to spend a little bit more time at home with their families. Sleeping in your own bed might seem like a routine thing, but for a lot of people in racing, it's a luxury. These next two weeks are going to seem pretty nice for everyone.
Of course, winning a race or two would be a pretty good feeling too.
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