It's time to retire the well-worn statement that "NASCAR will never start a race unless they believe they can run the full distance".  We've seen too many instances recently that it's just not true.

The latest was at Bristol.  Honestly, NASCAR is in a tough spot.  They can't get to the scheduled start time, have a dry track and not start.  That's just not fair to the fans who have made the effort to get to the track.  And, occasionally, things break right, like in Atlanta this year, and you get the entire race in.

But, to suggest that NASCAR wouldn't have started at Bristol unless they believed they could run the entire distance Sunday…that's living in lala land.

The truth is: most folks didn't expect us to get through Stage 1; much less get with 45 laps of an official race.  In fact, it was so unexpected, it became a tease.

I truly believe that NASCAR will do whatever it can to get a race in on the scheduled day.  But, sometimes they will settle for reducing the number of laps they'll have to run the next one.