The greatest contrast on the Winston Cup schedule takes place in April when NASCAR leaves the shortest, slowest oval in racing -- Martinsville -- and spends the next week at the longest and fastest, Talladega. A close second in the contrast department would be last week's Michigan and this week's Bristol, if you consider four elements:

Space
At Michigan, there's plenty of it. At Bristol, it's in high demand. In NASCAR, space is measured in racing lanes and by how easy it is to go two-wide around the track.

On a first observation of Michigan International Speedway, a person would likely describe the 2-mile facility as spacious. And why not? Drivers can easily run three-abreast there without fear of accident.

And if a driver needs more room, he can always expand the racing surface a lane by dropping onto the apron on the frontstretch -- a move which can only be duplicated at California Speedway, MIS's twin sister of asphalt.

Imagine a driver trying that at Bristol. Safely making the transfer onto the apron would be difficult enough; negotiating the transition back up the 16 degrees of banking on the frontstretch before racing into the 36-degree banked turns would be an entirely different and more complicated task.

Contact
Directly related to space, contact is the direct result of the lack of space. And the best measurement of the contrast in contact is the cars themselves.

Last Sunday after three hours of racing, the majority of the 43-car field entered the garage area the same way they left it -- in fabulously fabricated, dent-free, showroom condition. There is no doubt that racing team fabricators around the greater metropolitan Charlotte area went to work happy on Monday.

How will those same fabricators feel this coming Monday? The majority probably pretty glum, seeing all their recent hard work reduced to tear-away sheet metal, twisted frame rails, and plenty of future work.

And the total amount of carnage at Michigan -- the single-car wrecks of Steve Park and Hut Stricklin -- will probably be matched at Bristol in the first 10 laps.

Success
Success is generally measured by the three H's of racing -- horsepower, handling, and hustling.

Michigan places a high demand on horsepower and handling. Without one, a driver won't likely finish in the top 20. Without both, he's in for a long day of just riding around and running from 35th on back because drivers don't usually gain positions at MIS due to car attrition.

It's an entirely different story at Bristol.

Horsepower is fairly equal across the board, and handling on the half-mile track is standard for the concrete surface's consistent condition.

Success at BMS is about a driver hustling his car around the tight track, battling for position on every lap and protecting what he considers rightfully his.

It's nip and tuck every circuit -- and there is a huge element of luck, especially when cars start spinning down the self-cleaning track.

Excitement
From a driver's perspective, the two tracks are night and day. Michigan is a leisurely, incident-free Sunday country drive full of sweeping left-hand turns; Bristol is a brace-yourself metropolitan freeway battle for the fastest lane.

And as a viewer, I'd cross sports here and say the Michigan race was like the first preseason football game of the year -- highly anticipated, later discovered as not being the best the sport has to offer, but still the best event to watch at the time.

Bristol, though, is the regular season opener when everything counts. It's where the hype comes to an end and the promise and fulfillment of the sport create perfect racing harmony.

Saturday at Bristol, it's time to enjoy the best of NASCAR.

Bill Whitehead is an auto racing writer for the Stuart (Fla.) News.