Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head!

This past weekend we took a little trip to Bristol, TN to watch our first race at the Bristol Motor Speedway. We had a great time, but (as you can see in the above picture) the rain threatened to shorten our stay at the track. Instead, it lengthened our stay by a few hours.


Here are some pictures I took. You'll note that most of these pics are pre-race. It was a night race, and I did try to take some pictures during the race after it got dark, but very few of them turned out very well.

We actually went for the Busch race instead of the cup race. We've been wanting to check out Bristol for awhile now, but we've learned that tickets to the cup race are very difficult to obtain. Ticketholders are given the option of renewing their seats each year, and I'm told that families actually pass down their tickets to their children, etc. We decided that it would be fun to go to the Busch race, which is a lot easier to get tickets for, just to get a chance to see the track. A bonus is the fact that many of the cup drivers (including our favorites, Earnhardt Junior and Michael Waltrip) race in both the Cup and Busch races as Bristol.

The weather was pretty comfortable most of the day. There were clouds threatening rain pretty much all day, with the occasional sprinkle thrown into the mix, but it was nice since without the sun beating down it stayed pretty cool. Since we arrived late the night before, we didn't end up getting to the track until about 2pm or so.

We spent a good bit of time roaming around and bought a few souvenirs. Then we headed to our seats several hours before the scheduled start of the race, to watch both Busch and Nextel Cup qualifying. That was pretty cool because neither of us had watched qualifying before.

When we actually got to the track, we were blown away by the size of it. It's huge and tiny all at the same time. As you can see from some of the pics, there is seating all the way around the track. I believe capacity is around 160,000. Yet from our seats (and probably, just about any seat) you really can see the whole track. Most of the other tracks we've been to we've felt like we could see a lot, but you needed binoculars to really see some parts of the track, and there were other parts you just couldn't see no matter what. Not the case at Bristol!

So we got through the qualifying and pre-race stuff (including a nice, low flyover by 4 military jets) and the race was on. It was really cool being able to see the whole track. Not long into the race, however, it started sprinkling, and before long it really picked up to a pretty steady rain. Didn't take long before they red flagged the race and parked all the cars.

We both got soaked pretty quick. Lots of people started leaving ... at least that's what we thought at first. Instead, most of 'em were just leaving the grandstands to go into the area underneath them to shelter themselves from the rain. The rain was very short-lived so we just kind of hung out. Even though it was short, the track was soaked pretty good.

Finally, with the help of the jet dryers, they got the track dried off and were able to restart the race. I didn't really keep time, but that was probably about a 1 hour delay. Of course, before long, the rain came back, and they did everything over again. Everybody (including us this time) headed for shelter, and after a bit longer of a delay, they got things started once again. We were lucky that the rain didn't decide to make a third appearance and we were able to watch the race to completion. We had expected to be getting out around 10pm but instead it was more like 1am. And that was just leaving the track to go to the van. Then, of course, it takes a long time to actually get out of the parking area, and unfortunately, about an hour and half to get to the hotel we were staying at (nearby hotels were sold out long before I made reservations, even though that was several months before the race!). But eventually, we made it back to our hotel.

We had a lot of fun, in spite of the rain. Bristol is a really, really cool track. We definitely would like to go back. Don't know if we'll go next year or not. We are hoping to go on a cruise for our 15th anniversary, so we probably won't go to as many NASCAR races as we have this year. Bristol is officially Donna's favorite track, though. Me-- I'm not sure I have a favorite. They are all so different, I've loved all the ones we've gone to. I hope someday we get to go to a Bristol cup race. That'd be cool!