ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 9, 1997 TAG: 9704090052
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Bruton Smith says there's nothing wrong with Texas Motor Speedway, but others say it's not up to standards.
Memo from Bruton Smith to NASCAR Winston Cup drivers: I'm not accepting any criticism about the track at Texas Motor Speedway, thank you. And see you in Texas again soon.
Smith is the chairman of Speedway Motorsports, which owns the new facility. Tuesday he aggressively and at times combatively defended the new Texas speedway.
Smith said he had no plans to do any major reconstruction, even as criticism continued in the wake of a metal-crunching inaugural Interstate Batteries 500.
Car owner Richard Childress, usually a diplomat in NASCAR debates, said Smith's design was 47 years behind the times.
Said Smith: ``What we've built here is the greatest speedway in the world, as far as I'm concerned, and I will defend that to the heavens. I'm not going to take one criticism.
``I've had some people come to me and say we've built the eighth wonder of the world,'' he said. ``We spent an awful lot of money, we've built a great speedway, and we'll defend it any way we have to.''
Smith, speaking on the weekly Winston Cup teleconference, said rain in Texas on Thursday and Friday ``certainly affected the race, because our drivers did not get the chance to get out there and learn their way around the speedway. They didn't get a chance to get their chassis set up for it.''
Smith dismissed Rusty Wallace's comment that the track needed to be rebuilt, saying it was made in the heat of the moment following a crash. ``I always hate to see a microphone stuck in a driver's face as soon as they get out of a race car,'' Smith said.
``Right now, we're not going to change the speedway other than we're going to profile the track to make sure the contractor did not make an error at all,'' he said. ``We'll look at it at two-foot increments to see if there are any problems, but we don't see one.''
If there is a problem, Smith said, ``we're not talking about anything major at all.''
Childress and many others saw a major problem.
``It's a one-groove race track,'' he said. ``Darlington is a one-groove race track. They built Darlington in 1949-50. This is the 1990s. It needs to be redone to 1990s standards, where you can run two- or three-wide through the turns.''
Childress said the Texas track should be more like the new speedway in Las Vegas, which he said ``is one of the finest race tracks we've ever raced on.
``Texas has got 95 percent of everything positive, they just need to work on the race track,'' he said. ``I think they need to change the banking, just change the design and engineering to get away from the Charlotte-type trioval and go to a Michigan style, or fix it like Las Vegas. If I built a new race track for the '90s, I would build something that wasn't a one-groove race track.''
But Smith said there's nothing wrong with a one-groove track.
``We're not building an interstate highway,'' he said. ``We're building something to put on a fabulous event. It's got to be ... we've got to have the rubbing. I don't want to see people destroy a race car. I don't want to see anybody get hurt. But it's entertainment. We've got to entertain the fans.''
He compared Texas to his short track at Bristol, where the Winston Cup series stops this weekend. ``There's no other venue in the world that has got as many people on the waiting list for tickets as Bristol,'' he said.
One driver who won't be making the trip to Bristol is Ricky Craven, who broke his right shoulder blade and cracked two ribs in a crash April 3 during practice at Texas. Craven will be replaced in the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet by Jack Sprague, but he expects to be back behind the wheel April 20 at Martinsville.
Despite Craven's crash and others, Smith rejected the notion of redesigning the track with input from drivers. ``If you did that, you'd never get a speedway built,'' he said. ``If you went to 40 drivers, you'd get 40 opinions.''
Smith said today's drivers should take their cue from the drivers of old, such as Curtis Turner, who ``kind of took it the way it came.'' He added: ``I think Jeff Gordon said it best when he said, `We get paid to find the way around the speedway the best way we can and the fastest way we can.'''
On another front, Smith said he hopes his bid to buy North Carolina Motor Speedway will be accepted today during a board meeting at the track. Smith has made a bid for the speedway that he says is worth 60 percent more than a bid from Roger Penske and Penske Speedways. Both offers will be considered during today's meeting.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines KEYWORDS: AUTO RACINGby CNB