The NASCAR Cup Series only used to race at two road courses each season, and these races opened up the door for "road course ringers" to beat the usual contenders and find victory lane.
Those opportunities were few and far between, with 34 of the 36 points races still on the calendar still oval races, and most notably, with the entire 10-race postseason schedule featuring exclusively tracks with only left turns.
So whenever the Cup Series visited a road course, drivers such as A.J. Allmendinger were always considered to be among the favorites. In some ways, they still are. But Allmendinger has noticed a drastic shift as far as who the contenders are in these races.
And he knows exactly why.
"No, not at all," Allmendinger told Beyond the Flag when asked if he felt that Sunday's race at Circuit of the Americas was his race to win and clinch a playoff spot.
A couple of years ago, that response might have been different from the driver whose three career Cup Series wins have all come on road courses – and who has two wins in his last three Xfinity Series starts at COTA.
"On the Cup side of it now, the field is so strong on road courses," he continued. "I think every driver puts effort into it now. Back 10, 15 years ago, when there were only two road courses, I think you had a few drivers who put a lot of effort into it knowing that that's where we could shine."
But it's not just the extra effort from those drivers and teams that made the difference. It's the fact that the other teams, for lack of better terminology, didn't care.
And with just two regular season road courses, plus none in the playoffs, who could fault them?
"There were probably just a lot of guys, and honestly teams, that probably said ‘let's just get through these couple of races'," he continued.
A couple of years ago, back when the Cup Series only had a couple road courses on the schedule (three in 2019, two in 2020), Chase Elliott won four road course races in a row at one point, and he was generally listed between a +100 and a +200 favorite whenever the series visited one.
Compare that to this weekend, where Shane van Gisbergen is the +550 favorite. Sure, van Gisbergen is never the favorite to win on an oval, so road course races still give road course specialists the opportunity to shine.
But those odds resemble what you'd see from a typical oval favorite. In other words, road course races are much more wide open now than they've ever been before.
Some of that may have to do with the Next Gen car. But a lot of it is also the fact that NASCAR has undergone a major expansion to the road course portion of the calendar in recent years, and even the drivers who did not used to be huge threats to win on road courses are now. Likewise, there are no more runaway favorites.
With the schedule now consisting of five road course races and a street course race, don't ever expect to see anybody win four non-oval races in a row again.
"It's not like that anymore," Allmendinger said of the idea that some teams effectively used to treat these races as write-offs. "Every driver puts a lot of work into it. There are enough road courses where it matters, and it's not easy; it isn’t. And I say it's not easy, just meaning to even run top five, it's not easy."
That said, he still does feel like he can win on Sunday.
"I have confidence that if we go execute and we're at our best, we can contend to win the race, but there's a lot of stuff that has to go into that. So I think it's more getting on the race track in practice and qualifying and seeing kind of what type of speed we have and then sitting down with my crew chief Trent [Owens] and the team and saying, okay, we got to build a strategy on do we have a car to win or do we have a car that we have to kind of maybe manage to get the best result possible.
"But to try to look ahead and go, oh, this is our race to win, it's not. We got a lot of work, and it's going to be hard work, to go out there and win that race. But we just know that if we are at our best, we have a chance."
Allmendinger is listed by FanDuel Sportsbook as the ninth favorite (+1500) to win Sunday's EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at COTA. Full odds can be found here.
Fox is set to broadcast the race live beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET. Start a free trial of FuboTV now and don't miss it!