ESPN Sprint Cup

At three-quarters of a mile short, it's odd to hear drivers compare Richmond International Raceway to last week's venue, Talladega Superspeedway. But while four- and five-wide racing will be absent this year, drivers expect to do a lot of passing. Still, it is a small race track and drivers expect to do a lot of side-by-side beating and banging, too.

In short, drivers are expecting the best of both worlds for fans -- short-track excitement with big-track passing.

"Richmond is like a little mini-superspeedway in a way," Ford driver Matt Kenseth said. "It's a short track, but it kind of drives like it wants to be a speedway. It's the same thing at most short tracks. You've got to be able to turn good in the middle and have good traction up off the corner.

"This track also gets pretty wide so there are several grooves. When you practice here during the day it gets pretty hot and then you race at night, the conditions change a little bit."

Richmond was repaved recently, which altered the paths around the paperclip-shaped oval, but it did little to change the fact that there are multiple paths around RIR.

"The great thing about this place is that there is more than one way to get around and move around and run different grooves," Chevy driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. "The top works pretty good if you need to try to get up around people and get a run on them -- especially when they repaved it a couple of years ago."

The passing and the rubbing makes it a fan favorite; the side-by-side racing make it a driver favorite, too. While the crews deal with the adjustment of the car from day into night, the drivers have to find the grooves that work best with their cars and have to make more on-track decisions that affect the race.

"It's not an easy track by any means," four-time champion Jeff Gordon said. "It's more of a driver's track, I guess. If you want to drive straighter into the corner and run around the bottom, then you can. If you want to arc in and run the high line, then you can. The driver has some flexibility in what you can do with the car. Any track that you go to that has that ... the drivers are going to like it."

Though that doesn't mean it doesn't puzzle them. With nightfall comes a cooler track, less grip and a shift in which lines work for certain cars.

"The thing that you normally fight the most is forward bite up off the corner and tight in the center," Earnhardt Jr. said. "So you're constantly trying to figure out subtle ways to improve the car without making one worse than the other.

"You've got to get your car turning in the center, so you've got to give up something. So hopefully when [the crew does] help you in the middle, they don't make it difficult to get up off the corners. So you sort of struggle with those two issues all night long."

At Richmond, we've seen drivers speed off to comfortable finishes, we've seen side-by-side finishes and we've seen drivers bump drivers to steal victories. We've seen just about everything and the key, the drivers say, is the size of the race track.

"It's the right sized track," points leader Jimmie Johnson said. "Aerodynamics can play a role here but we're still going slow enough where we can race side-by-side, lean on each other, use the bumper if needed. I think the speed is the right speed for our race cars. It's a wide short track with a lot of room and a couple of lanes for us to race side by side."

Rupen Fofaria is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at rfofaria@yahoo.com.