The final race of the NASCAR Cup Series Round of 8 is at Martinsville Speedway. It’s the step right below the season finale which will decide who wins the championship and etches their name in history forever.
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Only the toughest and meanest challenge on the schedule can balance the pull of this position. This is precisely why the promotion has crafted a fixture that will require drivers to race across 500 laps at the Martinsville Speedway.
The upcoming Xfinity 500 is not the everyday Cup Series race. It will make the final call on the four drivers who’ll be competing for the title in Phoenix.
At 0.526 miles, the speedway is already a tough nut to crack without all the pressure. Put them together and it becomes a “beast of its own”, as Denny Hamlin once said. So, what makes it a difficult oval to navigate?
Bell answered in a recent interview, “Martinsville is a driver’s racetrack, and you aren’t going to be good there unless you are a good race car driver. It’s pretty hard to fake your way around it.”
“The race is extremely long, so you have to be good at all the parts of the sport.” Making 1,000 turns around Martinsville is something any driver would sweat at. And that’s what the Xfinity 500 asks for.
Making passes is almost impossible. The nature of the Next Gen car and the length of the track deny any chance that drivers have of overtaking each other. The close racing further creates scenarios where tempers rise beyond healthy levels. Bell continued to rightly put it, “It tests every ability that you have as a driver.” Included in this is the test of physical toughness.
How physical is a race at the Martinsville Speedway?
A Martinsville race is pretty much a full-body workout that drains drivers as no number of hours in the gym can. The extensive brake work ensures that the lower body is used as much as the upper. Stewart-Haas Racing driver Noah Gragson touched upon this recently.
He said, “It is a physical one. You never stop there. You’re shifting the whole time, so you’re pretty much driving one-handed, and you’re constantly on one pedal or the other with the brake or the gas. So you’re pretty worn out mentally and physically. It’s a demanding racetrack to go out there and run fast.”
Adding more drama to the scene are the new Goodyear tires that are to debut this weekend. Softer tires than ever used before will be in play and make securing a quality finish a tricky job. What this means is that no driver nor crew chief has a proper idea of what to expect going into the race. Winning a Cup Series championship won’t be an easy task. Martinsville will ensure that.
