Elton Sawyer addresses potential for full repave by NASCAR at Iowa Speedway

Iowa Speedway underwent a partial repave in preparation for hosting its first-ever NASCAR Cup Series race this past Sunday, and the results were well received.

Despite only the entrances and exits of turns two and four getting a fresh coat of asphalt and the third lane near the wall being left undone, NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer doesn’t feel it’s guaranteed that Iowa Speedway will be fully re-paved if it hosts another Cup Series race next season.

Speaking on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday, Sawyer said the sanctioning body will definitely consider it, but emphasized how important it was to see “great racing” on the mixture of the new and old pavement.

🤔 "A lot of questions to answer on that."#NASCAR's Elton Sawyer addressed the potential of a full repave for @iowaspeedway.

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“Our goal going into Iowa when we announced it last October was not to repave,” Sawyer said. “We wanted to get that first race on that old pavement and kind of get a data point. But that just wasn’t the case. Some areas needed attention and we did that, and we have what we had there this past weekend. Again, the unknowns of how the racetrack was going to race. Now we sit here on Tuesday afterwards and we had great racing.

“We had side-by-side, we had two lanes. So, I’m sure we’ll have a lot of dialogue around if we go back, do you repave the whole facility? Do you just repave that third lane up by the wall? A lot of questions to answer on that, but I think the No. 1 thing is we had really, really good racing this past weekend. No matter what we do, we need to make sure that we’re either heading in a positive direction to make the racing better, or to leave it as is and have another data point out there next year.”

Joey Logano speaks out on Iowa Speedway repave

While the partial repave yielded good racing, some drivers feel it could be even better if NASCAR fills out the third lane at the top of the corners. Joey Logano said after the race that while you don’t necessarily have to fill out the entire track, he’d like to see it “have more than two-and-a-half lanes.”

“I mean, I would — I think it would be better, if they re-paved the rest of it,” Logano said. “Because at no point does the track have more than two-and-a-half lanes, three lanes. Like, it’ll never be wider, the way it is, ever, ever. So, I would probably just do the rest. You don’t have to do the whole racetrack. You know, you could keep the straightaways the way it is, that’s fine. I would probably just bring it to where it all ends at the same point, off the corner, and maybe just do the rest to the wall.

“It’s kind of like, I don’t know, it looks like they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened. Don’t know the story or what happened, but I felt like, what’s two more lanes? I don’t know.”