Martinsville get 2 race dates a year. Spring and Fall. Just this year they reduced the spring race to 400 laps instead of the usual 500 in an effort to reduce length/time of races. The Fall date is still 500 laps though.jshank83 wrote: ↑May 05, 2022Martinsville I am pretty sure is 400 LAPS not miles.RockChalkSTL wrote: ↑May 05, 2022I think a lot of that makes sense.
My question was kind of inspired by noticing that Martinsville Speedway, the smallest track in all of NASCAR at just over a half-mile, hosts a 400-mile race. It made me wonder if the 300-mile race in St. Louis is kind of a trial to see how the market draws for the event.
Usually I think they go by miles in the number on the bigger tracks (Daytona 500) and laps for the number on smaller tracks. Whichever is bigger.
NASCAR has addressed the long races and they're trying to reduce race lengths across the board mainly because people don't have the patience/desire to view a 3-4 hour race every week like they did ~20 years ago. I think this factored into the decision to make the Gateway race 240 laps/300 miles because since it's a new venue to the Cup Series without any history, they have a clean slate to work with so they chose to make the race 240 laps. With that being said, 240 laps around Gateway is a long time. I go to the trucks race every year and they race 160 laps and that race is almost 3 hours long so I think with the cautions, that this race will be closer to 3.5 hours.
As a rule of thumb, all races are made to fit within the 3-4 hour window. This is based on track lap time, amount of wrecks that the track usually has, and overall hype of the event. Obviously the Coca-Cola 600 or Daytona 500 are marquee races throughout the year so they're gonna go beyond this time window, but a track like Gateway, that is relatively flat and has roughly a 30 second lap time, and does usually have a decent amount of cautions, will have fewer laps which will result in the race lasting between 3-4 hours.
Very long-winded answer lol.
