by Darrell Waltrip

Updated: August 24, 2007, 9:57 PM EST 10 comments

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But remember, the Truck races are always exciting. They're shorter. You've got to get it done and run as hard as you can for 200 laps so there's not a lot of strategy. Mark Martin never even changed tires, for Pete's sake.

You approach the Truck race a little bit differently than you approach the Busch race. While those races are similar, the Cup race is a whole different animal. As the rubber builds up on the concrete, it'll get slicker and slicker. On concrete, the rubber lays on top of the track while the rubber goes down in the cracks on asphalt tracks, creating a tacky groove.

After the Trucks and the Busch cars have put rubber on top of the concrete, you're going to see Cup drivers run as high as they possibly can because they're trying to get the right-side tires in a place on the track where the rubber hasn't built up. Early in the race, a lot of cars will try to run the high groove.

DW visits NASCAR's Back to the Future exhibit at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Click here for more photos. (Rusty Jarrett / Getty Images)

Back in the day, I won a bunch of races running right up next to the wall. You get such a great run off the corner when you do. But you also have the problem of the guy on the bottom coming up in front of you and squeezing you into the wall. That's what happened with Kyle Busch and Travis Kvapil in the Truck race.

Bristol won't be any different on Saturday night than it's ever been. One of the things that makes Truck races at Bristol better is they only start 36 trucks. Forty-three cars at Bristol are way too many. Go back and read stories I've written over the last few years. I've always said they've got to get 10 cars out of the race before they can have a race. That's what you'll see again on Saturday night.

When some of the cars are knocked out of the race, drivers have a better opportunity to race because they've got more room to operate. When the leader takes the green flag, the guy in 43rd place is half a lap down. The leader will catch and pass him at about lap 10 or 15. It creates havoc most of the time.

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Wednesday night's race was the track at its best. By Friday night's Busch race, the track is a little more difficult to handle. The tires are too hard. They always are on a new track, and the cars don't have a lot of grip so they're going to slide around more.

So you're putting 850 horsepower down on a track that has lost some grip with tires that are too hard. Plus, it's the hottest it's been in Tennessee. We've been in a drought and over 100 degrees every day for the last month and a half.

If you think the weather is hot, you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait 'til you see how hot people's tempers will be at Bristol on Saturday night. Now, that's hot!