Entering Saturday night's Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway, many fans were expecting the usual Next Gen short track event: a 500-lap parade with little passing or excitement.
Instead, it was the polar opposite. Much like the spring 2024 race at Bristol, tire management was crucial to the extreme. Drivers couldn't go more than about 40 green flag laps without being forced to pit for fresh rubber, and Christopher Bell outlasted Brad Keselowski after making a three-wide pass on Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith on the final restart.
It was a refreshing change of pace, but it still wasn't good enough.
Bristol tire wear derby highlights an unacceptable standard
If a race such as Saturday's like had happened five years ago, it would have been looked at as an abject disaster. Goodyear would have been raked over the coals for bringing a tire so soft that teams nearly ran out of available equipment.
Nobody would have enjoyed watching drivers putter around the track at half-throttle for the first 450 laps, while each caution required extra time to clean up debris and tire rubber.
The 2008 Brickyard 400 comes to mind. Tire wear was so rapid that day that there had to be scheduled yellow flags thrown throughout the afternoon to prevent blowouts. It was considered one of the worst races in Cup Series history, and it did damage to one of the series' crown jewel events that the track's reputation in NASCAR still hasn't recovered from.
Saturday's race, as well as the spring 2024 Bristol event, were basically the short track version of that. Except, because the racing at Bristol has otherwise been so unwatchably bad during the Next Gen era, we're looking at it as a positive development.
Saturday's event scored above an 80 percent in Jeff Gluck's weekly "good race" poll.
Was Bristol a good race? 80.6% of you said Yes.
— Jeff Gluck (@jeff_gluck) September 15, 2025
-- Ranks No. 9 of 18 Bristol concrete races. Spring race got 20.1%
-- Ranks No. 7 of 14 Christopher Bell wins (including exhibitions)
-- The other heavy tire wear race at Bristol (spring 2024) got 87.3%
If some people enjoyed what they saw last weekend, more power to them. It certainly had its moments. It was unpredictable, strategy was key, and contact was high, with 14 caution flags throughout the evening.
All in all, it had the feel of a true endurance test of both man and machine, just the way 500 laps at Bristol are supposed to feel, and that's a resounding plus.
But let's not let this be the solution to NASCAR's Next Gen problem. There's a happy medium that must be found between single-file snoozers and tires that can't last for more than 10 minutes at a time, and it starts with fixing the car that has ruined short track racing.