Unexpected Changes
First of all North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham,Nc has now lost it's last race and is no longer on the schedule. The Rock unfortunately goes the way of North Wilkesboro which was also bought out for its race dates.
In other related news Rockingham is being sold to Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports Inc. This is the source of one new westbound race as Texas finally gets a second race. Bruton should be happy as his new date is third-to-last which puts him squarely in the middle of the NEXTEL Cup playoff series.
Also, the Southern 500 at NASCAR's olderst SuperSpeedway in Darlington is no longer. This fall's Southern 500 will be the final version of the grand old race. Darlington's sole NEXTEL Cup race date in 2005 is Mother's Day weekend which always used to be an off-week.
California and Phoenix both pick up spring new spring races. California is now the second race of the year between the Daytona 500 and Las Vegas races. Phoenix keeps the second-to-last race date and adds a race in the end of April.
Unexpected Stability
After much speculation one race that many people expected to move will be staying put. The NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge will remain at Lowes Motor Speedway and will keep its date instead of moving to the Saturday night before the Coca-Cola 600. It was widely predicted that the All-Star race would move to Richmond which is the home of NEXTEL and would share an existing race weekend with the Richmond race so as to free up a weekend on the schedule. But NASCAR has decided to keep the All-Star race as it is and continue to allow it to consume an entire weekend.
Another non-event in the 2005 schedule is that there are no new tracks on the schedule. This is certainly bad news for Pikes Peak, Gateway International, Kentucky and Nashville Superspeedways. All of these tracks were hoping to find their names on the new schedule and all came up short.
The only thing constant in NASCAR is change and the 2005 schedule follows along with that theme in some unexpected ways.
