NASCAR’s revised schedule most jam-packed stretch in a long, long time

NASCAR lovers will get to love a whole lot of serious racing future month as all three significant series return to the keep track of. The Cup Series by itself is scheduled to keep four races in an eleven-working day stretch from Might 17 through Might 27, with two races each and every at Darlington Raceway and Charlotte Motor Speedway. Three extra races in the Xfinity and Truck series are set to go green throughout that time, as effectively.

Supporters of aged-time racing can tell you that NASCAR has a whole lot of encounter in scheduling a whole lot of races above a short period of time of time, although back in the working day, it was primarily by layout. This year’s condensed set up is an attempt to make up races that had been postponed due to the fact of the COVID-19 pandemic and get back on pace to operate a full 36-race plan.

Additional: Current NASCAR plan for 2020

You have to go back pretty much fifty percent a century, to 1971, to find a similar squeeze. That was the previous year the Cup Series ran a 48-race plan. However the time stretched eleven months (mid-January to mid-December), there had been nonetheless moments when several races had been operate just a handful of times apart.

With info from Racing-Reference.facts, we present this Southern scramble from the spring of ’71:

April eight, Columbia, S.C.

Winner: Richard Petty. The King recorded his fifth acquire in the season’s to start with eleven races, this one particular at the fifty percent-mile Columbia Speedway in Cayce.

April 10, Greenville, S.C.

Winner: Bobby Isaac. Isaac won by two-additionally laps above David Pearson at the fifty percent-mile Greenville-Pickens Speedway. He led 181 of the two hundred laps and earned $1,430 for the acquire.

April 15, Maryville, Tenn.

Winner: Richard Petty. The series moved to .520-mile Smoky Mountain Raceway, wherever Petty resumed his dominance. He won by 8 seconds above Benny Parsons. They had been the only two drivers to operate all two hundred laps.

April eighteen, North Wilkesboro, N.C.

Winner: Richard Petty. Year acquire No. seven was just as easy for Petty, who finished a lap-additionally ahead of Pearson in the Gwyn Staley 400 at the 5-eighths-mile keep track of. Petty went on to acquire 21 of the 48 races that year and claim the 3rd of his report seven series championships.

There was a equivalent crush of races in July of that year — four in 8 times, including a back-to-back — as NASCAR built its way up north from Bristol to New York condition, Prolonged Island and New Jersey. Petty won the previous three of all those races.

All of that helps make this year’s scheduled solitary-working day doubleheader at Pocono seem like a breeze.