There was a point in time, not all that long ago, when any race at Talladega Superspeedway was among the most anticipated of the whole season.
And why wouldn't it be? After all, Talladega was known worldwide for its snarling packs of more than 30 cars, all running two, three, and even four wide around the 2.66 mile oval at speeds approaching 200 mph. It was always unpredictable, and always extremely exciting to watch.
As the superspeedway portion of the NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series schedules comes to a close, though, it would seem that those days are now a distant memory.
A new form of plate racing, the two-Car draft, has completed a successful coup of the traditional style of superspeedway racing, breaking up the big packs and creating a much maligned form of racing that seems almost unrecognizable.
While a form of the technique traces its roots back to the introduction of the Sprint Cup ''Car of Tomorrow,'' the two-car draft formally established itself at Daytona testing in January.
There, teams discovered that two cars hooked together can not only be faster than a pack of cars by up to 10 mph. This connection can also be sustained by keeping the front bumper of the rear car out to the right of the lead car, allowing air to flow through. This keeps two cars from having to constantly swap positions in order to keep the rear car from overheating and losing an engine.
The result has been a cancer to superspeedway racing, resulting in a form of racing characterized by spaced out strings of cars, team politics and a comical amount of radio interaction between drivers, which has turned racing at Daytona and Talladega from a spectacle of tight quarters at high speeds into a farce of the movie Top Gun.
Despite the frequency of two-car draft races with close finishes and large amounts of lead changes, the form of racing is almost universally reviled as boring by fans and frustrating by drivers, who complain that they have no control over their own destiny in a two-car draft.
As Dale Earnhardt Jr. put it quite bluntly, ''This is a bunch of crap.''
There was a glimmer of hope going into this past weekend's Good Sam Club 500 that the two-car drafts would be broken up per rule changes that NASCAR had made to make the racing prohibitive. Restrictor plates were increased by 1/64th of an inch, pressure valves were recalibrated by 8 pounds per square inch and teams were prohibited from putting grease and lubricants on the bumpers of the cars. However, NASCAR failed to account for cooler fall temperatures, which allowed drivers to continue running in two-car drafts, rendering NASCAR's changes null and void.
Watching a race at Talladega has ultimately become just like watching a race at Michigan, Chicago or any other track on the circuit. There's nothing special about it – and that's a tragedy.