Dale Earnhardt Jr. said driving on newly reconfigured and repaved Kentucky Speedway was “not fun.”
Tony Stewart said “none of us want it to be like it was here.” and suggested that the Goodyear tires used in last Saturday night’s Quaker State 400 were so hard they could be frozen and used as giant hockey pucks in the NHL.
But other NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers, particularly winner Brad Keselowski and 10th-place finisher Martin Truex Jr. (who ran up front most of the night), sang the praises of the repave at the 1.5-mile track and said they had a blast running on it.
“I honestly think this is the best race you are going to see on a repave,” said Keselowski, who won his series-high fourth race of the season.
Go figure.
No matter what the topic, drivers usually are going to have different opinions and perceptions of what is going on in NASCAR. And more often than not it’s directly related to how well they ran or finished in a particular race.
But Scott Miller, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, said the governing body itself could not have been more pleased with how the first races since the repave unfolded on the Kentucky track. All three of NASCAR’s national touring series raced at Kentucky last weekend, culminating with Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race.
“We’ve known as an industry that the repaves are very, very difficult historically,” Miller said in the media center after the action had wrapped up. “This was no different. But really the action in all three of the events this weekend I thought for a repave, it turned out really well, and we had obviously a lot of action.”
Miller said NASCAR’s new aerodynamics package in the Cup Series really helped in that race, despite multiple wrecks throughout the course of the event.
“I think the low, low downforce package, if that’s what we’re calling it now, helped at this race on the repave,” Miller said. “I think the corner speeds would have been extremely high, and with the higher downforce stepping out of the groove might have even had more consequences than we had (Saturday night).”
Miller said another positive aspect of the repave was that it enabled NASCAR to dry the track more quickly than it had when it rained in the past, as there were thunderstorms that limited the on-track action on Friday prior to the XFINITY Series race.
“One of the things that I think has probably been overlooked a little bit is we had some weather, and we ended up with probably one of the hardest tracks on the circuit to dry to one of the quickest tracks to dry,” Miller said.
“The two times we had to put the equipment out there, the track dried really good, and the drainage that they put in underneath and all that stuff just worked fantastic. That was something that I don’t think has really been mentioned, but that’s a huge plus for the new facility here.”
So despite all the wrecks and a smattering of complaints from drivers — most of whom couched their comments by saying they understood the older surface needed to be repaved — Miller declared the weekend a huge success.
“I think all in all, it was really a great weekend at Kentucky Speedway,” Miller said.
