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Martinsville Speedway adding lights for 2017

Martinsville is getting lights soon. (Getty)
Martinsville is getting lights soon. (Getty)

Martinsville is adding lights after this fall’s Sprint Cup Series race.

The track has been hosting Sprint Cup Series races since 1949 and hasn’t had lights. That will change soon as the track announced Wednesday that lights will be installed as a security blanket in case races go long. For now, anyway.

The 2015 fall race, won by Jeff Gordon, took over 3 hours and 45 minutes and concluded as darkness enveloped the track thanks to cloudy skies. Lights would prevent a situation like that from happening again and, of course, give the track the ability to host a night race in the future. Martinsville’s two races next year are scheduled for the daytime.

“Speculation beyond [2017] would be a moot point,” Martinsville president Clay Campbell said via USA Today about the time of future Martinsville races. “It does enable us to explore more options than we have now, so that’s the main thing.”

Night races can sometimes be less entertaining than their day counterparts because of the way the highly-engineered Sprint Cup cars grip a cooler track surface at higher speed tracks. We’re not engineers (as we’ve said many times before), but it’s hard to see how a night race would make Martinsville any less entertaining because of the nature of racing at the flat half-mile track.

The lights, which will be LED, are part of a $5 million improvement project for the track.

Night races are currently slated for 2017 at Daytona, Kansas, Charlotte, Kentucky, Bristol, Darlington and Richmond.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!