It’s the best of both worlds for fans, theoretically, giving us the high speeds of the oval while also giving us the technical left and right turns of the road coourse.
This will be the third year the ROVAL has been used. I’m kind of still figuring out whether I like tracks trying to mesh together as we saw in August when NASCAR raced on Daytona’s road course/oval. I like the speed of high-banked ovals and I love road courses, but not necessarily a mash-up together.
The road course aspect shrinks up the chances of winning for more than half the field, and when adding in the speeds needed on the high banking, it erases a couple of other candidates to win because they don’t have the horsepower to compete with the big-name teams. Where a traditional road course like Sonoma offers skilled road racers a better chance to make up time through the corners to mask being an underfunded team with slower cars.
But it’s a NASCAR race and there are only five remaining on the season, so I’ll watch it and have some action as well. Sunday’s race will be the final race of the Round of 12 and four drivers will be chopped from playoff contention and two of those drivers currently sitting outside the top-8 can win the race to advance — Kyle Busch and Clint Bowyer.
Bowyer, who sits in 11th-place in the standings, is 38 points behind eighth-place Joey Logano for the final spot. Busch sits 10th, 21 points behind. They don’t technically have to win to advance to the Round of 8 but I think in their minds they’re coming with a mentality they have to.
Busch is tied for the active lead with four road course wins and has 11 top-fives, but the mash-up tracks have been hard on him. He was 37th on the Daytona road course in August and he was 37th last season on the ROVAL and 32nd there in 2018. If you throw those three races out, he’s finished 11th or better in 10 straight road races since his 2015 wins at Sonoma.
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