A smooth surface leads to increased speeds, and Busch Series teams showed that Talladega Superspeedway hadn’t lost much speed after a track repaved last summer had some time to cure.

Mike Wallace hit 197.342 mph in the draft during Thursday’s first practice session for Saturday’s Aaron’s 312 and NASCAR was quick to react. By the time the second practice session started, the carburetor restrictor plates had been changed from 15-16ths of an inch to 29-32nds, lessening speeds by more than four mph.

“I didn’t think (it was too fast), but it’s hard to tell,” Martin Truex Jr. said between practices. “We only had about 10-car drafts. And when you’ve got all 43 cars out there, it gets a whole lot faster. The bigger the pack, the faster it goes. I guess we were kind of flirting with speeds where if we got in a bigger pack we probably would have got going too fast.”

ESPN.com