Secrets of driving Bristol, from a guy who's done it often

I've seen hot tubs bigger than Bristol. Seriously. The kinds of hot tubs that Hollywood stars get photographed in -- seriously, those things are nearly as big as Bristol. It's a tight little bowl of a track, a half-mile cup that's one-fifth the size of Daytona or Talladega. It's so small that when the field is running at full 43-car strength, it stretches halfway around the track. 

I took some pace car laps around Bristol early Saturday afternoon, with former Sprint Cup driver Brett Bodine at the wheel. And the entire time, I felt like I was swirling down into a drain. You cruise the straightaways, you can feel yourself leaning into the center. You hit the curves, and you can feel your internal organs start to shift. Your limbs get heavy, your gut presses back deep into the seat. And at Bristol, the drivers will do this 500 times. 500. I think we did six laps, but I honestly don't know -- it all blurred into one mass of walls, retaining fences and seats.

It's a nerve-wracking track, and at the speeds they're going, NASCAR drivers get around it in about 15 seconds. So you'd figure you'd have to be up on the wheel all the time, right? Wrong. That's the way to put yourself out of the race in a hurry.

"It's a track where you can't relax, but you have to relax," says Bodine, who ran more than 14,000 laps here over 31 races. Just before the first time he drove at Bristol, Junior Johnson pulled him aside and demonstrated how to survive at the track -- relax your hands, one at a time, in the straightaways. If not, your hands cramp up and you can't react quickly enough.

And by the same token, the way this track sets up, you've got to be looking far down the track. Your spotter has to be watching down the turns, because you can't see that far, but it's up to you to react. That's racing in Thunder Valley, and it's going to make for a hell of a spectacle.

Bodine also thinks the track's recent reworking -- a project that took some of the banking out of the turns -- is actually beneficial and will make for some great racing. We're about to find out whether he's right.

(Note: We're in Bristol for the race. You can follow our minute-by-minute updates all Saturday by checking out the Twitter feed.)