Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Track Type -  Intermediate - An oval that is greater than 1 mile in length, but less than 2 miles in length.

Track Details

Completed : 1996
Distance : 1.5 miles
Shape : D-shaped oval
Banking : 20° turns9° frontstretch9° backstretchFrontstretch : 2,275 feet
Backstretch : 1,572 feet
Seating : 142,000

How To Win In Las Vegas

·  The track has long, sweeping corners and fairly long straightaways. You have to have the whole package -- downforce, balance and aerodynamics -- but downforce is vital. You stay in the gas a long time, and the tires really grip well, especially at the bottom of the track, so you can't pull out the fenders as wide as you can elsewhere or put the spoiler straight up. Teams will work hard to maximize downforce without sacrificing drag.

·  Drivers will fight the cars as the race goes on and more rubber gets laid on the track. This is called a late exit push. You'll be up against the wall, you'll think all is well, your car is turning. Then you get up on the straightaway, and the car is carrying so much speed there that it will not want to turn. The only way to stay out of the wall sometimes is to back off the throttle, which kills momentum.

Plotting strategy

·  Track position is everything at Vegas. Changing the right-side tires and getting back out on the track in front of others is a good strategy late in the race. But I'd try this early in the race to see how it works because changing two tires might make the car push. If it already is pushing, you may need to make a chassis adjustment. You don't want to wait until the end of the race to find that out.

Where the action is

·  It's in Turn 2. When you have a couple of cars coming out of Turn 2, one might get on the outside and the other on the inside, and both aren't handling the best and get into each other. We'll see a similar situation coming off Turn 4 but not as much because the turn coming off that corner isn't as sharp as coming off Turn 2.

·  We will see a lot of the passing by drivers who get a better run off the exits of the corners and can stay in the throttle longer before getting into the next corner. The bottom of the entrances are a good place to pass if you can keep your car down on the bottom of track.

Track History

Just a few miles north of The Strip, Las Vegas Motor Speedway sits like a diamond in the desert. One of the most complete racing complexes in the world, its 1,600 acres include road courses, a three-eighths mile oval, a dirt track and a state-of-the-art drag racing facility.

At its heart, however, is the 1.5-mile Las Vegas Motor Speedway, home of a 400-mile race on the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series, as well as Busch and Truck Series events.

Construction of the $200 million complex began in 1995.

Nearly 2,000 tons of concrete were originally used to build more than 100,000 seats. Shortly after Speedway Motorsports Inc. bought the track in 1998, it announced plans to add 22,000 seats in the Dale Earnhardt Tower overlooking the frontstretch.

The first NASCAR race held at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was a Truck Series event in 1996. The Busch Series held a race there in 1997, and a year later the Cup series made its first visit with Mark Martin picking up the victory in 1998.

Construction of the Richard Petty Terrace in Turn 1 was completed in 2006, allowing fans a shot at 14,000 additional tickets and pushing the track's seating capacity to nearly 150,000.

Additionally, the track saw several major changes in 2006, as the entire surface as reconfigured with progressive banking installed, as well as fan-friendly features in the infield and moving pit road closer to the straightaway. Beginning in 2007, officials made grandstand seating during NASCAR weekend smoke-free.

Nuff Sed