Nobody finds us through the news

Mamba Smith is the founder of Queen City Garage, which publishes Grand National Today, a NASCAR news site, and produces The Grand National Show.

We write race stories every week at Grand National Today. Recaps, previews, who's moving where. That's the work I think of when I think of the site.

This week we looked at what a stranger actually finds when they search for something and land on us. Not one of those searches led to a race story.

Every single one led to a reference page: a track guide, a profile, a schedule.

What we looked at

There's a way to see which searches a website shows up for. We ran it on Grand National Today.

We show up for 173 different searches. Every one of them lands on a track guide, a profile, a schedule or a standings page. The number that land on a news article is zero.

One more thing was in there. When you ask Google how big Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway is, the answer box at the top quotes our guide to the track.

Why that makes sense

Once I thought about it, it made sense.

Think about what a race fan types into a search bar. It isn't "recap of last Saturday." It's "when is the next race at Langley Speedway." It's "how long is South Boston Speedway." It's "where do I park."

Those questions don't get old. A recap is news for two days. The schedule changes every season, but people ask for it every season too, and "how long is the track" is good for as long as the track is there.

So we rebuilt five of them

We started with the five guides sitting closest to the first page of results: Langley and South Boston in Virginia, Florence in South Carolina, Nashville Fairgrounds in Tennessee and North Wilkesboro in North Carolina.

Each one now opens with the things people ask. How long is it, what shape, where is it, what's next and when. Under that there's this season's schedule, in a table, taken from the track's own posted schedule.

I'll be straight about how it gets done. We build this site with an AI doing most of the assembly. It pulled each track's schedule from the track, laid out the answers and checked every page on the live site afterward. Which tracks to start with, and what a fan needs to see first, were our calls.

What we had wrong

Here's the part I didn't expect. Going back through five guides, we found four things we'd gotten wrong. The mistakes were ours. The rebuild caught them, by checking each guide against the track's own schedule and against our own coverage.

We called a North Wilkesboro race the Window World 400. It's the 450. We'd covered it under the right name ourselves and still had it wrong on the guide.

We said South Boston races on Friday nights. South Boston races on Saturdays.

We said Nashville's All American 400 has run every fall since 1981. The track calls this year's race the 41st running, and those two don't add up, so we took our line out and used theirs.

And we had two Florence races, the SC 250 and the SC 400, down as one-day events. The track's schedule has both as two-day weekends.

None of that is a big deal by itself. But these are places with decades of history, kept going by people who know every bit of it. If you're going to write the guide, you get the name of the race right.

All four are fixed. A few race winners are still blank, because we don't have them on file and we're not going to guess.

What changes

We're not going to stop writing race stories. That's still the job.

But I think about the guides differently now. I thought of them as background and the stories as the point. For somebody who has never heard of us, it's the other way around. The guide is how they walk in.

So the guides get the same care the stories do. The rest of our track guides are next.

Here are the five:

• Langley Speedway
• South Boston Speedway
• Florence Motor Speedway
• Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway
• North Wilkesboro Speedway

If we've still got something wrong about your track, tell us.