By Jerry Bonkowski
For all intents and purposes, the first phase of the Next Generation car comes to an end this Sunday in the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.
To date, NASCAR has gone through one-quarter of its 2022 schedule – nine of 36 points-paying races, to be exact – and we’ve seen virtually every type of race track that the Next Generation/Gen 7 car has been tested upon.
Save for Talladega, that is.
We’ve gone through Daytona, which is – but also isn’t – the same as ‘Dega.
We’ve seen the 2-miler at Fontana and 1.5-mile tracks at Las Vegas and Atlanta. We’ve seen the 1-miler at Phoenix one-miler.
We’ve seen the road course at Circuit of the Americas. We’ve seen the short tracks at Richmond (3/4 miles), Martinsville (.526-mile) and Bristol (.533, albeit on dirt).
You name it, short track, road course, mid-size and more, and NASCAR has experienced it. And up to now, the Next Gen car has successfully passed each and every test.
But NOT Talladega, not yet. That’s an experiment still waiting to take place this Sunday.
Let’s face it, ‘Dega is a whole other animal unto itself. At 2.66 miles around, it’s the largest oval or tri-oval on the circuit (that does not include road courses like the far larger 4.048-mile layout at Wisconsin’s Road America).
For those of you who’ve never visited Talladega in person, the place is big. REAL big. In fact, it’s so big, that I’ll never forget my first impression of the place when I went through the access tunnel and into the infield for the first time.
No lie, the first words that came to my mind about Talladega when I exited the tunnel were “damn, this place is so big you could fit a small third-world country in the infield.”
And one other thing about the place: it’s fast. Well, let me clarify that, as well. It USED TO BE fast. It was the fastest track in NASCAR until the sport’s powers-that-be decided to slow cars down with speed-decreasing devices called restrictor plates back in 1988 due to a number of wrecks that caused cars to go airborne, including Bobby Allison’s horrendous crash in May 1987.
Still, even with so-called “plates” on the cars for more than three decades, cars still managed to get around ‘Dega at a pretty good clip nonetheless. But instead of 210 mph without plates, they would hit around 195 mph.
Unfortunately, the implementation of restrictor plates – which gave way to the similar speed-robbing concept of tapered spacers in 2019 – produced one side effect that has become an unexpected hallmark of racing at both Talladega and Daytona … but more so ‘Dega than ‘Tona, though.
That is, the simple-named yet fearful-sounding “big one.”
You know what the “big one” means: bedlam and pandemonium where multiple cars wreck, smash, roll or flip end over end, occasionally catch fire and typically leave the track on the back of a tow truck rather than under their own power.
The “big one” can be so devastating that literally in the blink of an eye, close to half the field can be knocked out of action.
I’ve seen more big ones than I care to count, where as many as 20 cars can be collected at any one time (I seem to recall one time a 24-car fiasco resulted, but I can’t remember the year).
I must admit, I used to hate seeing “the big one.” I hated it with a passion. I felt that, but for the grace of God, someone would not be going home to their family that night, all because of a “big one.”
Thankfully, safety has become so pronounced in NASCAR since we lost Dale Earnhardt at Daytona in 2001, I can’t think of any driver who has even suffered minor injuries in a “big one” since then. I’m sure there probably has been someone, but that shows just how good NASCAR’s safety initiative has become.
Today, the “big one” is a combination of chaos, mayhem and, in a weird sense, a dramatic and beautiful (okay, maybe not exactly beautiful in entirety) ballet, where cars go every which way, scattered up and down the frontstretch, backstretch and the obligatory high-banked turns.
The “big one” today has become a thing of awe, where spectators in the stands or gathered around the TV set in their home, turn to the person next to them and invariably say, “Holy cow (or some other adjective), did you see that?”
The “big one” has become a modern day version of the old “And They Walked Away” TV video series that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting oftentimes death-defying wrecks that, as the title implies, the drivers walked away from.
While I still get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach every time a “big one” unfolds at Talladega – and that feeling stays there until every last driver climbs out of his or her race car – I understand why the big wrecks have become so popular over the years.
If popular is the right word, which to me, it really isn’t.
I remember a conversation I had about 15 years ago with a NASCAR fan who had been a 25-year season ticket holder at Talladega. We talked about the lure of racing and I asked him what it was that brought him out there race after race, year after year.
In a sense, it was kind of like the old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I’ll never forget his answer, because I’ve never, ever heard a better description of the lure of “the big one”:
“I come out here to enjoy the racing,” he said, before pausing and adding with a huge smile on his face, “but it’s the big ones that keep me coming back.”
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