ROSSBURG, Ohio -- Imagine how fans seven years ago would react to NASCAR Cup series teams preparing for a road course that combines the Charlotte Motor Speedway oval and runs through the infield.
And then how they would react the next day when the track owner of Eldora Speedway clamored for a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race on dirt.
Any fan who heard all that seven years ago might have just finished laughing. A road course at the famed Charlotte Motor Speedway? Serious talk that Cup cars could run a dirt race at Eldora?
That's stupid talk. Like saying the Las Vegas convention bureau would pay $2.5 million a year so it could bring a second Cup race to Vegas at the expense of the rabid race fans in New Hampshire.
Oh, wait.
As NASCAR, the track operators and teams grapple with the current state of the live-event business coupled with an uncertain future of the auto industry, there is no such thing as a dumb idea. All ideas need to get consideration, and the NASCAR events this week are prime examples.
When Joey Logano first heard in February 2017 that New Hampshire Motor Speedway would lose a Cup date to Las Vegas starting this year, his reaction was the same as that of many race fans who grew up in the Northeast.
"As a New England guy, I was bummed out to see it leave, but being in the sport, I can see why," Logano said. "I get it. I'm OK with it."
Logano knows business, and Speedway Motorsports Inc. would have been foolish to pass up the offer of $2.5 million a year (including $500,000 of marketing funding) to bring a second Cup race to Vegas. The only question would have been which track loses a date.
The loser ended up being New Hampshire, a 1-mile flat oval that has had some great Cup moments but has never served as the greatest show. Race fans in New Hampshire would come to watch modifieds on Saturday and then stay to see the Cup cars Sunday at the only Cup track in the Northeast.
Despite a passionate fan base in the Northeast and across the border into Canada, the buzzkill of too much single-file racing and the economy started to take their toll. The July races were hot, and the stands were clearly more full for the playoff race in September, but even that element failed to keep packing the fans in the stands.
So this weekend, the Cup series heads to New Hampshire for its only visit of the year. Ticket sales should be up over last year's July race, but whether the event will have buzz -- much like California seemed to add buzz when it went from two races to one -- remains a mystery.
"My opinion is for most of these racetracks we should go just once anyway because it makes it more of an event," Logano said. "When you have two shots to go, you go, 'Eh, I'll miss this one. I'll go to the next one.'"
In trying to add buzz to races, to create events, nothing was more of an indicator of that than Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday, NASCAR Cup teams tested on the 17-turn road course at Charlotte. The testing did nothing to discourage the predictions of plenty of carnage in a battle of attrition in a course ripe for calamity.
The Charlotte race will be a cutoff race in the first round of the playoffs, meaning one mistake -- or getting caught up in someone else's mistake -- could end a championship contender's season.
Just wait for the soundbites from drivers entrapped by this course. They likely will be venomous attacks on the idea that a championship should be decided by an impure road course, a gimmick of sorts. But the entertainment value? Much better than the traditional fall races in Charlotte.
It can be argued that drivers are the ones who control the throttle, brake and steering wheel. They will be the ones responsible (along with Goodyear) for how to handle the course.
All the talk about potential ridiculousness at the Charlotte road course could have reminded NASCAR fans of another race pegged as a desperate way to attract attention: the Camping World Truck Series race at Eldora when it debuted in 2013.
As the series returns to Eldora year after year, drivers tend to get more used to racing on the dirt. Granted, the buzz around the race isn't the same as it was six years ago. The campgrounds aren't quite as full, and the number of NASCAR executives coming to check it out have dwindled.
But it is one of the few Truck series races to actually create buzz, to get people who don't normally watch to watch. Just like when a local driver would race against the series regulars when the Xfinity Series would come to town, the Eldora Truck race attracts sprint-car and dirt late model drivers who want to compete at Eldora in anything and everything.
To see current USAC midget championship points leader Logan Seavey nearly pull off the win in his first Truck race Wednesday night was electric. Chase Briscoe owned him on the late restart, which is the way it should be -- the driver who has more experience should prevail. Seavey spun his tires a little bit, and Briscoe made him pay.
Only two of the 32 trucks that started failed to make it to the finish. There were 23 trucks on the lead lap, including Wendell Chavous, who appeared to crash his truck so hard in qualifying that just finishing the race seemed like a miracle.
It was a fun race to watch, with intrigue and tire/pit strategy. But a Cup race at Eldora? It's a track in the middle of cornfields, and, quite frankly, from everyone who was there for the King's Royal sprint-car race the previous weekend, the crowd didn't measure up.
Still, where else in the trucks would fans have seen Norm Benning legitimately pass Noah Gragson in a heat race?
As the NASCAR world has become increasingly frustrating with aero-dependent rules and the crowds continue to decline so much that there was a test on a makeshift road course right in the middle of the Charlotte infield, a bigger race at Eldora is starting to make more and more sense.
"It sure would be cool," Eldora Speedway owner Tony Stewart said. "Why wouldn't you?"
As the sport continues to struggle, a Cup race at Eldora might not be a bad idea.
"Look at how excited everybody was tonight," Stewart said. "The whole atmosphere here is just different than anywhere you go. This is when the haulers come down in here and you're passing crew guys and they say, 'We love this series, we look forward to our race.'"
The Eldora buzz is similar to that of the New Hampshire modified race. Ask anyone up at the track and they'll say the modified is the best race of the weekend.
Those cars draft, and those drivers don't appear to care about tearing stuff up. Or at least they race that way.
"You can't argue that it's not the best race of the year [there] -- handling, slide jobs; it's big tires, big bumpers and no crap to give," Logano said.
Sounds like an attitude that could be brought by Cup drivers to ... Eldora Speedway.