'New and improved' is half right

By DAVID GREEN

Every time the NASCAR circuit visits Atlanta or Darlington, visions of the two facilities as they used to be are prominent in my memory. I'll stop short of saying that the remaking of those two classic tracks was monumentally stupid; I'll just say that's my opinion of the projects.

Atlanta isn't a bad racetrack now. It has produced some excellent, competitive events since it was made over in -- what was it, 1996? '97? But neither was it a bad racetrack before then, when it also produced some excellent, competitive events -- on a wonderful 1.5-mile symmetrical oval with long, sweeping turns, perfect transition to and from the banking from the short straightaways and multiple grooves.

Engineers would probably dispute this, but the old Atlanta track seemed to have a bowl shape to its corners -- progressive banking, before that term was in vogue. I don't know. Scientific analysis might have debunked that theory. But the track sure seemed to race that way.

Tracing its roots to 1960, it was one of the core group of superspeedways that, a decade later, joined Darlington. Another of that elite group was Charlotte Motor Speedway, with its unique configuration -- a variation on the trioval shape introduced in 1959 by Daytona, with a flat frontstretch with double-dogleg turns.

Charlotte is no longer Charlotte; it's Lowe's Motor Speedway. It's also no longer unique. It has clones in Texas and Atlanta.

As for Darlington, the original southern superspeedway had a character and flavor that no other NASCAR track -- not even Martinsville -- could match. It's still special to me, just because of the heritage and my own memories of the old days.

But as for the races nowadays, most of the feeling is gone. Ever since the track was flip-flopped, even though the egg-shaped oval itself is largely unchanged, the sensation -- for me, anyway -- is as if it's a completely new track.

Supposedly, the reason for the flop (pun intended) was that there was inadqeuate room between the track and the highway that runs parallel to it on the north side to expand the main grandstand. There's actually more space there than there is between Georgetown Road and the frontstretch of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and that has proved to be no problem at all in Indiana.

In my opinion, Darlington's management missed a chance to build up, as an alternative to sprawling backward, in a multi-tiered grandstand that would have provided a perfect evolutionary stage -- from the open grandstand of the 1950s, to the covered stands that appeared in the '60s and lasted until shortly before the flop, to an Indy-like double-decker.

Imagine what the view would have been like from that upper deck!

If you never visited the tracks in their older editions, you probably can't relate to my sentiments. You don't know what you missed.