After winning at Martinsville Speedway last Sunday, Tony Stewart was talkative in the way only a happy race winner could be.
But the Home Depot driver confessed that he once had a great disdain for the tiny Virginia track, so much so that he had wished they would fill it with water and make a fish pond out of it.
That's a similar complaint made by the late Dale Earnhardt Sr., also a former Nextel Cup champion, about Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Texas, during its troublesome infancy. And looking back on TMS -- it celebrates its 10th year of racing with the Samsung/RadioShack 500 this weekend -- it's been a rough decade of racing, but the racing is getting better in the Lone Star State.
Nowadays, Stewart, the winner of the DirecTV 500 in Martinsville, is singing a different tune. In his loquacious post-race monologue, Stewart said the short track should always have two dates. He even said NASCAR should throw some clay down over the concrete and asphalt and turn it into a throw-it-in-slideways dirt track.
Back in 1997 at TMS in the Interstate Batteries 500 -- won by rival Exxide battery-sponsored driver Jeff Burton -- the first lap was a disaster, as the 43-car field slid and ran over each other in Turn 1 in a barrage of metal carnage.
The scene was played out again in 1998, prompting complaints from Earnhardt and Kenny Wallace, who engaged in a he-said/he-said back-and-forth with TMS track owner Bruton Smith and general manager Eddie Gossage over the track's treacherous transitions and narrow, fast racing groove.
"When Texas opened it was so great because the fans were awesome and the place looked so big and nice," NAPA driver Michael Waltrip said. "I couldn't wait to get there. But once we raced on it, that feeling went away. The track originally made me sick to my stomach, because you just couldn't race there. It wasn't much fun for the drivers or the fans."
Smith and Gossage were apologetic following that fiasco, vowing to improve the 1.5-mile superspeedway, facility accommodations and even traffic patterns.
TMS has since become a well-seasoned track after alterations to the tricky racing surface, and cautions and highlight-reel wrecks have reduced through the years. Like Stewart's thoughts on Martinsville, the general opinion on TMS among Cup drivers has changed, too.
"Thankfully, Eddie Gossage and his team listened to the drivers and spent the money to make Texas Motor Speedway one of the best tracks on the circuit today," Waltrip said. "Last year we were able to race two and three-wide. That kind of racing puts on a good show for the fans and lets the driver's race."
As the old saying goes, things evidently are bigger in Texas -- and better, too.
