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This last weekend was a rare off-weekend on the NASCAR Winston Cup schedule. The teams will race this coming weekend in Pocono, take a week off, and then begin a grueling 12 races in-a-row stretch that doesn’t let up until Halloween.

From the Brickyard 400 on August 5th through the final race of the year in Atlanta on November 19th the NASCAR Winston Cup teams are busy 15 of those final 16 weeks. This leaves precious little room for injury, rain, family, sponsors or any of the hundreds of other reasons that a team needs an off week.

What if the east coast gets a rainy stretch? The current schedule only has one remaining open weekend for a reschedule. What would happen if two races were rained out between now and November? Would NASCAR force teams to run two points races at different tracks in two or three days. Or would NASCAR move a race to the end of the season after Atlanta?

The current 34 race schedule is a walk in the park compared to the monster that is the proposed 2001 Winston Cup schedule. The current best estimate has teams running the 38 (36 plus The Bud Shootout and The Winston) races beginning with the February 11th Bud Shootout and running through to Atlanta on November 18th with just 5 open weekends. Add test days, sponsor commitments, building new race cars and fixing smashed ones and you have virtually eliminated any hope these people have of seeing their families. This is just too much to ask of the teams.

It’s time to start the painful process of eliminating some of the redundancy in the schedule. Start by looking at tracks that have two races each year and cut one of them. Do we really need to go to Pocono, Rockingham and Dover twice a year?

Note that I am not suggesting that they eliminate any racetrack completely, just cut some tracks back to only one race per year. It will be painful. Ticket sales will have to straightened out to account for the fans that only attend the deleted race. The local economies will certainly take a hit as well. However, in order for NASCAR to continue to grow they will need to make some difficult decisions.

NASCAR clearly needs to expand it’s geographic reach but you can’t get the benefits without some pain. If NASCAR is going to continue to add new racetracks to the schedule it’s time to start trimming the existing schedule.