Photo by Keith Smith 1978 Cumberland International Speedway.. Fayetteville NC
Then again, Alex... I was thinking of the old oval Portland Speedway and not the Portland International Raceway road layout, which might be a very interesting venue.
With a background in Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations and Business Administration, I'll certainly have to proclaim my lack of any knowledge of fluid physics, but somehow I wonder if the outcome of the encounters with our Richmond short track concrete wall by Jerry Nadeau and Derrike Cope would have been less severe with SAFER Barrier?
Evergreen is certainly a superior race track, but I was trying to minimize the number of tracks in need of significant improvements.
As for Richmond, the way this schedule is formatted makes it easy to swap Chicago and Richmond's dates.
If we were to immediately go to the Pacfic Northwest, Evergreen (Monroe, WA) is head & shoulders above Portland. Give Richmond's traditional date the weekend following Labor Day to Chicago? Paul Sawyer just rolled over in his grave. Ironic that we (Richmond) hosted architects, engineers and $$$ folk from the proposed Chicago track at Richmond when NASCAR suggested to them that we (RIR) had the best walls, fencing and restrooms of any track. But, as Chase opined, bench racing and real world economics usually prove strange bedfellows.
