SAD DEPARTURE: Chase Elliott Has Officially announced His is departing from NASCAR and Reason Why……..

SAD DEPARTURE: Chase Elliott Has Officially announced His is departing from NASCAR and Reason Why……..

NASCAR continues to barrel toward its first NASCAR National Series events at Rockingham Speedway, which will take place in April, since the 2013 season, the No.

71 Spire Motorsports team will feature the upcoming NASCAR Xfinity Series/Craftsman Truck Series race weekend on Michael McDowell’s Chevrolet this weekend in the Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway.

While he has never competed in an official race around the 1-mile track in North Carolina, McDowell has fond memories of Rockingham Speedway from the early days of his NASCAR Cup Series career.

“Rockingham is a historic and iconic racetrack,” said McDowell in a team press release.

“Even though I haven’t raced at it, I did a lot of testing there. When you’re a rookie in the Cup Series in 2008, you did a lot of testing, and Rockingham was one of those places.

So, I have a lot of laps there – not racing – but a lot of laps.

Rockingham is a great racetrack, iconic and historic, and it shows NASCAR’s continued effort to get back to its roots.

Track Enterprises is the official promoter of the upcoming April 18-19 triple-header race weekend at the iconic track. The promoter is tickled to see the Rockingham Speedway promotion featured on a NASCAR Cup Series race car.

“Track Enterprises is thrilled to partner with Spire Motorsports and Michael McDowell to showcase NASCAR’s return to Rockingham Speedway,” said Bob Sargent, President of Track Enterprises.

“NASCAR has a very rich history at both tracks and Martinsville is just a couple of hours drive from Rockingham.

We thought it made great sense to take advantage of a NASCAR Cup Series race in such close proximity to Rockingham.

We want fans to know that we’ll have an exciting weekend of racing in store and that tickets are still available, but they are going fast and we expect a great crowd both days.

In addition to the NASCAR Xfinity Series North Carolina Education Lottery 250 on Saturday, April 19, and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event on Friday, April 18, the ARCA Menards Series East will compete at the track in a 125-lap event prior to Saturday’s Xfinity Series event.

Tickets for the NASCAR Race Weekend at Rockingham Speedway can be purchased on racetherock.com, or tickets can be obtained in person at Rockingham City Hall.

The track is offering both single day, and weekend ticket packages for the race weekend.

Nor am I saying that the leaders of today’s Cup standings are the demigods of 1992, when Alan Kulwicki drove his Ford Thunderbird to a championship by outsmarting Bill Elliott and outlasting Davey Allison and Harry Gant.

This on a grid that also included Mark Martin, Dale Earnhardt, Rusty Wallace, Terry Labonte, Darrell Waltrip and a paddock loaded top heavy with future NASCAR Hall of Famers.

In more recent seasons, I think of 2011. A year with 18 different race winners. That’s when Tony Stewart won the title in a tiebreaker over just-inducted Hall member Carl Edwards. The rare season when Jimmie Johnson didn’t hoist the Cup included the heavyweight likes of Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and the Busch brothers. A traffic jam of talent so thick that David Ragan and Regan Smith both won races but still couldn’t crack the top 20 in points.

Those were all amazing seasons powered by amazing wheelmen, but let’s not commit the sin of allowing the nostalgia of the rearview mirror to cloud our vision and appreciation for what we are witnessing in this 4K UHD present day.

The argument for today’s roster as one of the most talented we’ve ever seen is about depth.

When Berry — the guy who not so long ago was running sim races before he was plucked out of the digital ether by Dale Jr. and dropped into the real-life short track world — pulled his No. 21 Ford into Vegas Victory Lane, the 34-year-old Tennessean was the 19th different race winner in the past 41 Cup Series races. And he did it by coming out on top of a field of 36 racers and becoming the 25th of them to win at least one Cup Series race. Yes, 25!

In NASCAR’s modern era, since 1972 when the Cup Series cut its schedule to 30-something races and fully shifted toward asphalt speedways, there have been only 14 seasons with 15 or more winners.

Four of those years came in the past four seasons. After five races this year we already have three, even after Christopher Bell gobbled up three wins in a row.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know what this Next Gen car is, and I know that it was specifically designed with parity in mind, as are in-race and in-season rules that didn’t exist in any of those other seasons I already mentioned.

All of that has undoubtedly opened doors for teams and drivers that in another era would have been left behind in a literal cloud of brake dust.

However, before anyone starts touting the glory days of the second half of this century’s first decade, including that benchmark 2011 season previously mentioned, make sure to remember that was the age of the Car of Tomorrow, a shoebox with wings that had also been conjured up as a playing-field leveler.

But the Obi-Wan Kenobi-like voice that I keep hearing as I sort through all of that is really more of chorus.

Words first spoken to me by then-teenager Austin Dillon, racing in the NASCAR Truck Series for his grandfather, Richard Childress, and catching all sorts of flak from the Raise Hell Praise Dale crowd for running the slanted No. 3 made famous by “The Intimidator.”

“Have I had opportunities because of my Pop-Pop? Yes. Are the rules different now than they were back in the day? Yes. But you know what? When the green flag drops, my granddad and those rules don’t drive the race car. I do.”

Since that conversation, he’s won seven Truck races and also added nine Xfinity wins and five Cup victories, including a Daytona 500 title.

These days, he’s not winning much of anything and is currently mired back in 32nd in the rankings with nary a top-10 finish.

And Dillon’s words have been repeated to me so many times by so many racers.

“Everything out there is working against you, whether it’s the car or changes in the car or the racetrack and changes to the racetrack or the points and changes to the points, or just all those guys out there with you who are working to beat your ass,” Earnhardt Jr. said to me late in his career.