Cup race on dirt
If Tony Stewart's Prelude to a Dream event at Eldora Speedway in Ohio is any sort of success, will it be enough for NASCAR to look at possibily running a Nextel Cup Series race on dirt?
Tony Stewart hopes so. It's something he has suggested to NASCAR for the past eight years. Then again, Stewart would rather see every speedway on the Cup schedule eliminated from consideration and race only at short tracks.
"I think Wednesday night will be a good indication that NASCAR should look even harder at it," said Stewart, driver of the No. 20 Chevrolet for Joe Gibbs Racing. "We run road courses with cars that aren't really supposed to be run on road courses, so why not run them on dirt? It makes sense to do that. Who knows how big this is going to get?"
If it generates any sort of interest, especially as a pay-per-vew event, NASCAR will most certainly be taking a hard look at it.
"We never dreamed last year that HBO would have came on board and it would be on pay-per-view this year," Stewart said. "We had Buddy Rice from the IRL call last week and wanted to try to get a ride at the last minute. I think when you guys see the cars you'll see how much effort went into getting these cars to where everybody knows who's in what car this year."
There wasn't a place for Rice in this year's race. Perhaps next year. Rice said there were a few IRL drivers who expressed interest in racing at Eldora.
"So that's maybe something that next year gets added to it so it tends to have more of an IROC flavor in having different drivers from different disciplines," Stewart said. "We've got two drag racers in the field, we're got Red Farmer and we've got Ray Evernham. It's not just about having Nextel Cup drivers in the field. It's about having guys that care about Victory Junction and guys that don't get a chance to do this very often coming together and running together."