No rage about the roads from this corner

By DAVID GREEN

The wine country of northern California may not be the favorite destination (physical or "televisional," if I may coin a word) for a great many NASCAR fans and some competitors, too. But I, for one, am looking forward to Sunday's Dodge/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway.

Personally, I wish the track were stilled called by its traditional name, which paid homage to Sears Point on the northern extremity of San Pablo Bay (no offense intended to the folks at Infineon Corp.). And I wish the NASCAR circuit had retained its old configuration, complete with the downhill Carousel corner, instead of undergoing a drastic revamping over recent years. Anybody remember that thrilling pass by Dale Earnhardt over Mark Martin in 1995?

But by any name, and in any configuration, it is still a road course -- and, as such, provides much-needed variety to the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series schedule.

I know I'm very likely in the minority here. I have many friends and acquaintances who think stock car racing ought to be staged only on oval tracks. I respect their opinion, but I prefer a variety of circuits.

I'm not asking for equal portions; two or three road-course events per year is fine with me. But I'd glad Infineon and Watkins Glen are on the circuit, and I wouldn't mind seeing the Cup Series return to Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis.

Yes, I said "return." Tim Flock drove a Bill Stroppe-owned Mercury to victory in a Grand National event (63 laps on the 4-mile course, 252 miles) at Road America on August 12,1956.

At least one NASCAR historian, the late Gene Granger, counted the Daytona beach and road circuit as a "road course," even though it had only left-hand turns and was shaped like an elongated oval, because it was something other than a traditional oval and utilized part of a public road. Not counting the GN events held on that circuit, the Road America event 50 years ago this season was the third race on a road-racing circuit in Cup history.

Coincidentally, this year marks the 50th anniversary of another road-racing milestone -- the establishment of the Watkins Glen International course in upstate New York, the other road course on the Nextel Cup trail. Prior to 1956, the famous Watkins Glen Grand Prix was held on a 6-mile circuit that began in the village, made an uphill right-hand turn toward the location of the present track, and ran northward before winding its way back to the east, then south along the lake shore and back into the town. The surface switched from macadam to gravel to dirt to concrete, and there was a point where the race course crossed the New York Central Railroad tracks.

Part of the allure for Sears Point and Watkins Glen, I'll admit, is the setting. Both are in gorgeous and dramatically different parts of the country.

But the racing is of great interest, as well. Great road circuits have distinct personalities. Even before it was revamped, Sears Point had the reputation among NASCAR drivers as a "short-track" kind of road course. Conversely, Watkins Glen -- even the short version utilized by NASCAR -- was considered a "superspeedway" road course.

The fact that many NASCAR drivers are not that much at home on road courses (Sterling Marlin once said Sears Point would be a fine track, if only they'd plow it up and turn it into an oval) only adds to the list of reasons why road courses ought to be a part of the schedule, along with short ovals, intermediate ovals and the restrictor-plate tracks that have come to be known as "speedways" or "superspeedways" (even though, for NASCAR records-keeping purposes, a superspeedway is an oval 1 mile or greater in length). I would add dirt ovals to the list, but that's a subject for another day.

Truth be told, many NASCAR drivers readily adapted to road courses as quickly as NASCAR began running them -- on June 13, 1954, on a makeshift course built on airport runways near Linden, N.J. Al Keller won that race, driving the Paul Whiteman-owned No. 4 Jaguar that, in light of Toyota's entry into Cup racing, has been retrieved from the trivia files and is now well known to most NASCAR fans.

TIME OUT FOR A TRIVIA QUESTION: Between the races won by Keller and Flock, there was one other event held on a course with left- and right-hand turns. What was the name and location of the track, when was the race held, and who was the winning driver? Email answers to me, or post them as replies to this blog item. (I can't promise any prizes; there's no corporate sponsor for this contest, you know.)

Buck Baker won the first NASCAR race at Watkins Glen, in 1957. Fireball Roberts, Marvin Panch, Eddie Gray and Jack Smith won on road courses before the decade was over.

In the 1960s and '70s, among the first to challenge the road-racing specialists such as Dan Gurney, Mark Donohue and others was David Pearson, who quickly became an outstanding driver. Dick Hutcherson stood on the podium after a third-place finish as co-driver of a Ford GT40 at Le Mans in 1966. In 1964, when Billy Wade became the first driver to win four consecutive Grand National races, two of the four were on road courses -- Watkins Glen and Bridgehampton, N.Y.

Bobby Allison, Richard Petty, Terry Labonte, Tim Richmond, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Benny Parsons -- all were road-course winners in the 1970s. Ricky Rudd and Rusty Wallace emerged as the standout road racers of NASCAR in the 1980s; Bill Elliott's first Cup victory came in 1983 on a road course, the great Riverside International Raceway, near the site of today's California Speedway in Fontana; and Earnhardt was plenty proficient, as he would later underscore in the 2001 Rolex 24 at Daytona in a Corvette, even though his first road-course win did not come until the 1995 Sears Point race referred to earlier.

Martin may have been second to Earnhardt in that 1995 race, but he proved to be yet another driver with dirt-oval origins to master road racing, along with Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart. Their abilities have rendered the advantages of so-called "ringers" such as Boris Said, Scott Pruett, the great Ron Fellows and others all but negligible these days, and in fact few since the days of Gurney and Donohue have any of them had much success against the NASCAR regulars. None of them has won, although Wally Dallenbach Jr. came painfully close at The Glen one time.

Yes, it's a totally different concept in many ways in comparison to oval racing. That's what I like about it. What I don't like is when road-racing fans put down oval racing as simplistic, or when oval-racing fans dismiss road racing. Each requires specific skills and each is very, very difficult to do well.

Like it or not, it is an entrenched part of NASCAR racing and has been for most of the sport's 58 years. From this perspective, that's a very good thing.