Phoenix International Raceway sits in perhaps the most picturesque setting on the Sprint Cup circuit, a valley surrounded by ochre hillsides and giant cacti. In the evenings, the sunset-tinged sky radiates with color.

Clamber to the top of Monument Hill, the promontory overlooking the race track where fans can buy a general admission ticket for $35, and the natural splendor of the Sonoran Desert and the Estrella Mountains unfolds before you. Remove the speedway and its man-made surroundings, and it looks very much like the kind of place you'd be hard-pressed to survive.

One reason Phoenix is almost universally beloved it because it is so unassuming, because at heart it is still a quirky track built in 1964.

Yes, this is very much the American West, the desert just as you'd envision it -- with rocky outcrops, valley floors covered in sage and mesquite, and small, half-hidden scaly things slithering around in the underbrush. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions and Gila monsters out there, for sure. Given the landscape, you'd seem just as likely to run across Pancho Villa or Wyatt Earp.

The race track, though, is a different matter altogether. Certainly it fits in with its surroundings, its somewhat rustic design consistent with the countryside, its bleacher grandstands and modest suite towers complementing rather than overwhelming the stark environment around it.

But strip away all the geographic references and focus on just that 1-mile, blue-walled oval, and any sense of place begins to dissipate. As glorious as they are, forget the mountains. Forget the desert. Forget the rattlesnakes and the Gila monsters. Remove all the tangential qualities, and you finally have the essence of what makes Phoenix great -- the fact that this could have been a track built 60 years ago, in the middle of NASCAR's heartland.

Make no mistake about it, this is a big-city speedway. Standing atop Monument Hill, looking away from the race track, the skyscrapers of downtown Phoenix and the area's bulbous silver football stadium shimmer in the heat-haze. More than 4.2 million people live in the region, making it the sixth-largest market that NASCAR visits each season.

From a track perspective, the starting point for NASCAR's expansion into major cities might well have been Bill France Jr.'s decision to award a race to Buddy Jobe's desert raceway for the 1988 season -- a decade before Las Vegas, Homestead-Miami, California and Texas came on the scene, and the national push began in earnest. (Continued)