When the NASCAR Cup Series rolls across the Virginia state line this week and checks into venerable Martinsville Speedway, competitors will not find anything different in Sunday’s Cook Out 400 that they haven’t encountered before.
Because it’s Spring in southern Virginia, and that means the start of the short-track season, though it is rather shortened — too brief, to be honest — in its current state.
Back in the day, there truly was a stretch — three-quarters of a month — when NASCAR visited its moonshining roots in North Carolina and neighboring Tennessee and Virginia, usually in the year’s fourth month but sometimes in the previous one.
This time it’s March, and it’s not three visits. It’s two.
The 400-lapper at the half-mile Martinsville Speedway, NASCAR’s oldest venue that opened in 1947, is the first of just two back-to-back races on bullrings less than a mile in length.
Let’s just call this stop in Martinsville and the day race in Bristol a “Fortnight of Fun and Frustration” because short-track racing is usually straight-up fun, though the races will be two weeks apart and not on consecutive weekends due to Easter.
It would be hard to ignore the growing frustration as one driver dominates the show.
Let’s start with Chevrolet’s struggles.
Through six races, the manufacturer has recorded 11 top-five finishes, which may sound like a lot, nearly two per race, but it has been hard to get all the way up front.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Shane van Gisbergen and Chase Elliott have each posted runner-up finishes at Daytona, COTA and Vegas, respectively, but the bow-tied hotshoes have not been able to take their cars to Victory Lane.
One-sixth of the way through the schedule, Chevy is experiencing its worst drought to start a season since the one before 2020, the COVID-stricken one that serves as a line of demarcation.
In 2019 in an 0-for-9 skid, the manufacturer watched Toyota win six times and Ford notch three more before Elliott finally parked his No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports ride in Victory Lane at Talladega on April 28.
Almost all the way to May without winning.
Chevy went winless over the next six to create a 1-for-16 stretch in nearly half the season, but at least Elliott bailed out General Motors.
Hope springs for the racing group though.
Since 2020, no manufacturer has hauled its way out of tiny Martinsville Speedway with more grandfather clocks, the bullring’s quirky trophy, than Chevy.
In 12 races, one of its drivers has left with the odd timepiece six times: William Byron with three, while Elliott, Kyle Larson and Alex Bowman have one apiece.
But the frustration runs through the garage, primarily due to the success of Toyota’s Tyler Reddick, who is making this look way too easy at 23XI Racing with four wins in six starts.
After Reddick smoked the Darlington field and ran away from Brad Keselowski by 5.847 seconds — the largest winning margin since Bill Elliott claimed the 1994 Southern 500 by 6.39 seconds — the Ford driver said it’s basically the field versus Reddick right now.
“A lot,” said Keselowski when asked what he needed to beat the sport’s new star. “We were not that close to him. He’s in another category, for sure.
“He was really in a class of his own.”
That’s the source of much of the current frustration and won’t be alleviated until NASCAR’s rest figures out how to outrun the driver who is currently NASCAR’s best.
