The growth of Martinsville Speedway
By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
October 10, 2001
9:34 AM EDT (1334 GMT)
After seeing the new tracks at Chicago and Kansas City this year, you really have to marvel. These facilities were fantastic -- nice garages, smooth pavement, good traffic flow. Anything and everything you want out of a race track, they gave us.
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Richard Petty
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True, they still need a little time for the asphalt to come in and "cure" some. But once that happens, you're going to see some pretty good racing at those tracks. The side-by-side stuff will happen more often, and a second groove will open up by itself after some more laps get run on those tracks.
There is a science to building these tracks. Besides taking into account what the track itself is going to look like, they want to get as many fans in as they can and give them the best site lines that they can give them.
That's the reason you're seeing some of these one-and-a-half mile "tri-ovals" being built now. Because of the angles on the frontstretch, you can add more people in the grandstands without squeezing them in -- making them more comfortable -- and give them a better view of the track and everything going on.
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Martinsville Speedway
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This week we head to Martinsville Speedway in Virginia. Believe me, I have no complaints with Martinsville. We won 15 NASCAR Winston Cup races there. It's a great track.
It's a little over a half-mile in length. The current measurement is .526 miles. Believe it or not, Martinsville used to be .525 miles. Did it grow? Not exactly.
Track distances are measured 10 feet from the outside wall all around the race track. That's not usually the preferred line or the groove. In fact, that's a big-time trouble area at a lot of race tracks. But NASCAR needed a constant measurement formula -- and that gives them one. And it's one they've always used.
OK, Martinsville came out at .5255 miles in length. Actually it was closer to .5245 from what I've been told. So in everybody's mind, it could have gone either way. For years, it was listed as .525 miles. About 10 or 12 years ago, they rounded it up and made it .526 miles.
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Dale Jarrett takes the checkers at Martinsville in April.
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Why the difference? When you are figuring out an average speed around a track, the same time is faster at .526 miles than it is at .525 miles. Not much. Hardly anything. But still faster.
That's the story of how Martinsville "grew."
Some people don't know this -- most folks in stock car racing know -- but Martinsville started out as a dirt track. H. Clay Earles dug out a dirt track just south of Martinsville, Va., (just north of the North Carolina line near Greensboro) and scheduled a stock car race.
Folks came from everywhere after church that Sunday in the late 1940s to see it. The problem was they all came in their "church clothes." They said by the time the left, everybody was covered with red dirt from the track itself.
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Turn 1 at Martinsville.
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Still, they ran as a dirt track for quite awhile before Clay decided to pave it in the mid-1950s. He packed the dirt and laid the pavement down, and we went from there. No engineers, no physics experts, no scientists -- just pave over the dirt and go racing.
It's worked pretty well.
Nothing against the scientists or anybody, and I like the new tracks. But Martinsville is the way a lot of dirt tracks became asphalt tracks -- and the racing is as good as anywhere.
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