Soggy Atlanta NASCAR race pushed to Tuesday

By Rick Minter

For the AJC

Since the earliest days of the track now known as Atlanta Motor Speedway, rain has been a constant nemesis.

After eight of the track’s first 10 races were affected by rain, some began referring to the track, then known as Atlanta International Raceway as Atlanta International Rainway. The rains were a big factor in the track’s early financial woes which eventually led to a stint under bankruptcy protection.

The latest rain delay caused by Tropical Storm Lee wiped out Sunday night's AdvoCare 500, with racing postponed until 11 a.m. on Tuesday.

NASCAR officials said that since the forecast was for heavy rain, there would be no attempt to run the race on Monday because of concerns about safety of the fans at the track.

The rescheduling of the race to a midweek date is necessary because there are no open weekends remaining on the schedule, and the 26-race regular season ends on Saturday at Richmond International Raceway.

The delay means the crews who prepare the cars likely will have to adjust for different conditions at AMS than what they’d planned for, and their preparations for Saturday night’s race at Richmond also will be affected.

“It just makes a short week going to Richmond for our engineers [to] do some stuff to our Richmond cars on pull-down rigs and things,” said Steve Addington, crew chief on Kurt Busch’s No. 22 Dodge “That’s just part of it. We’ll have to adjust to it. … We’ll send a guy home if we have to if we are here a day or two. It’ll all work out.”

Addington also said that if the race winds up being run in the daytime, the chassis set-ups under the race cars will have to be modified.

“We’ll just have to adjust,” he said. “We’ve built some adjustment into it and that’s knocking spring rubbers in, pulling spring rubbers out, doing whatever we have to, adjusting wedge and track bar stuff.

“That’s just something we’ll have to do as track conditions change on us and we do that every week.”