Jim Hunter, vice president of corporate communications for NASCAR, points out that the two road courses currently on the schedule are located in two of the most-heavily populated states, New York and California, thereby offering strategic locales for the sanctioning body.
"I think there's always going to be a place for them, unless there's some unforeseen economic situations that might develop where these places are," says Hunter. "That's what happened at Riverside and Ontario, (where two former tracks were located) in California. From a NASCAR philosophical standpoint, we always want to have at least one road course because of what it means to the championship series."
What road courses lend to the Winston Cup championship, says Hunter, are intangibles that place the series and its drivers among the elite motorsports sanctioning bodies in the world.
"The dimension that the road courses bring, and I think our fans would want to identify with this, is it dispels the myth that our drivers aren't as good or as talented as Formula One or some of the other open wheel type racing venues," says Hunter. "On a road course they do have to shift gears; they do have to brake going in and out and through the esses; they have to set the car up to get through where they want to be fastest on the course; they have to use a lot of strategy."
Not only are the two road courses on the Wintson Cup schedule located in strategic markets, NASCAR has a vested interest specifically in Watkins Glen. The track is owned by International Speedway Corp., which is controlled by NASCAR's France family. So, NASCAR would not likely pull an event from a track that would cost the ISC revenue.
NASCAR held its first road course race in June of 1954, running 50 laps on a two-mile track that took in the runways at an airport in Linden, New Jersey. Of the 43 cars in the race, 21 were foreign makes, including 13 Jaguars, five MGs, a Morgan, a Porsche, and an Austin Healy. Al Keller, driving a Jaguar, won the race, as the lightweight, nimble Jags claimed four of the top six spots.
Even today, while you won't find foreign brands in Cup races of any type, true road course cars are a different breed from standard Cup cars. Differences in the bodies and chassis are subtle-changes in the location of filters and coolers, changes in the rearend housing, suspension, and so on-but there are enough differences to make the cars useless for other types of tracks.
While the expense of building a road course car varies little from other cars, there is a downside to having inventory dedicated to just two events each year: Teams end up with rolling stock sitting idle for months at a time. On a two-car team, that means having at least four cars that see little action, including two backup cars that may not see the track for a season or more.
Some teams even bring in driving specialists, a Boris Said or a Ron Fellows, for example, to bolster the effort on road courses. "One thing I am proud of is every year we have road racers taking shots at all of us and we pretty well hold our own," says Hamilton. "That's strange in itself, because we don't do it and we don't take a lot of pride in it. Yet when we get out there with all those guys, we sort of equal out. That's probably an equipment thing, too. Who knows?