This April weekend spotlights NASCAR’s two worlds

As 43 Sprint Cup Series and 43 more Nationwide Series cars sped around Texas Motor Speedway on Friday and Saturday night, NASCAR fans were treated to big-league stock car racing in the 21st Century.

When 36 Camping World Trucks Series trucks take the green flag Sunday at Rockingham Speedway, fans will once again experience racing as it was in the 20th Century. Well, besides the fact that it will be trucks and they will race under a few different rules than in the old days at the Rock.

For the first time in nearly a decade, NASCAR will be able to embrace the rich excess of the 2000s while at the same time pay tribute to the good ‘ol Southern racing fans loved from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Texas Motor Speedway, the site of the Cup and Nationwide races this week, is a track that sums up just about everything that has changed in NASCAR since it last raced at Rockingham Speedway in 2004.

Texas is a big, 1.5-mile oval that can seat more than 190,000 people in one of the largest metropolitan markets in the country, sitting just outside of Dallas. Rockingham is a small track slightly more than one mile in length that seats 34,500 and lies in a town with a population less than 10,000 people.

Texas Motor Speedway opened in 1997 on a huge, flat open piece of land that is about as scenic as the parking lot at a mall. Rockingham Speedway opened in 1965 and sits in the hills of southern North Carolina.

NASCAR’s roots are in those hills in North Carolina, but its money is now in places such as that open space near Dallas. About the only similarity between the two tracks is neither has been repaved in the last five years.

When NASCAR left the Rock in 2004, it was the first year of NASCAR’s new title sponsorship with NEXTEL, a telecommunications company that has since morphed into Sprint. It was also the first year of the Chase, NASCAR’s oft-debated playoff system.

For many, 2004 was the beginning of the new modern era. Sure, the changes were coming years in advance, but NASCAR took the path of the future when it reached the 2004 fork in its history.

The sport went from a Southern passion sponsored by tobacco company Winston to a nationwide sport that tweets, competes in huge cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City and is sponsored by a telecommunications company.

The changes in the sport in the last eight years will surely show up Sunday during the truck race. That will be the first NASCAR race at Rockingham to feature double-file restarts, wave-around cars and lucky dogs. Shoot, if we’re lucky maybe there will even be a debris caution.

However, when the trucks fire up on that crowded pit road at the Rock, it will mark another important time in NASCAR’s history. For years now, many fans have felt pushed aside as NASCAR charged into larger and larger markets with shiny new racetracks that ended up all looking the same.

Now it will be those fans’ turn to enjoy a slice of what made them racing fans in the first place. As in the old days, tires will probably be at a premium and the chances of a fuel-mileage finish are incredibly low considering most of the drivers will be seeing one of the toughest tracks in the country for the first time.

In any case, this weekend offers something for everybody. The NASCAR on FOX Digger generation can enjoy the races at Texas Motor Speedway while the generation that remembers not having races on television can enjoy NASCAR’s return to Rockingham Speedway.

Let’s hope this is just the start of similar weekends that can take fans down the memory lane side of the fork in the road.

The Rock finally back on a NASCAR schedule

There have been several high-profile schedule-related announcements in recent years, but none nearly as sweet as this one.

Rockingham Speedway is back on a NASCAR schedule and will host a Camping World Truck Series race April 15, 2012.

After Jeff Gordon won his 85th career race Tuesday in Atlanta to put him third on the all-time wins list, a week of history and nostalgia continued Wednesday when North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue announced that a NASCAR race will be run at Rockingham Speedway for the first time in eight years.

Wow. Has it really been that long since Matt Kenseth nosed out Kasey Kahne in a photo finish in 2004?

This is one of the more remarkable racetrack stories in history. This sort of thing simply doesn’t happen. When NASCAR leaves a track for bigger markets, it doesn’t return. Period.

This is like the Wood Brothers winning the 2012 Daytona 500 with Trevor Bayne. People may have hoped the Wood Brothers would win another race or that NASCAR racing would someday return to Rockingham, but they would’ve been living in a dream world if they really expected it to happen.

Former NASCAR tracks litter the Southeast as the sport has grown and moved into bigger markets. North Wilkesboro Speedway, for example, is the next most recent track to be abandoned by NASCAR. After a brief re-opening in 2010 for the first time since NASCAR left in 1994, it closed once again in May.

Rockingham Speedway closed in 2004 as NASCAR continued to drive away from its Winston Cup days and into the Chase era.

But, former driver Andy Hillenburg bought the track in 2007 from Speedway Motorsports Inc, which bought the track in 2004 so it could end racing at The Rock and add another race at Texas Motor Speedway.

In the next four years Hillenburg put The Rock on his back and carried it out of the grave that awaits most tracks that NASCAR leaves behind.

Now it is back.

What makes this move even more remarkable is NASCAR pulled the plug on another old-time short track just two months ago when it announced the truck and Nationwide series would not return to Lucas Oil Raceway in Indianapolis in 2012 and the Nationwide race would move to the bit Indianapolis Motor Speedway to run on Brickyard 400 weekend.

At the time it looked like another move in the long stretch of NASCAR running from old short tracks, but this time NASCAR took a step back toward where it belongs.

It is still be wildly optimistic to think Rockingham would ever hold another Cup race, but at least there will be a NASCAR race on the speedway in southern North Carolina. The smiles on fans’ faces might be just a little bit bigger that day.

After a decade where NASCAR made many decisions that abandoned long-time fans, the sanctioning-body finally threw them a bone by putting Rockingham back on the schedule.

What Hillenburg and the people at Rockingham Speedway have done is incredible, and hopefully it is the start of a long, new life for The Rock.