Last September was a learning experience for all the Winston Cup racing teams at Kansas Speedway.

Crew chief James Ince in particular learned one valuable lesson: Avoid the dirt.

While in town for last year’s race, Ince decided to also run a car at the Kansas City, Kan., Lakeside Speedway’s short dirt track. That was fun, but he had no fun that Sunday in the Winston Cup race. His driver, Johnny Benson, blew an engine and finished 37th.

“We’re not going to run the little track this year just to stay a little bit focused,” Ince said.

But the biggest lesson learned last year was that Kansas Speedway was a good facility and adding it to the schedule was a good idea.

Driver after driver in the garages at Dover International Speedway during the weekend expressed warm feelings for returning this week for the Protection One 400.

“We can’t wait to get out there,” Benson said. “It’s just a real nice facility.”

Driver Jerry Nadeau said, “Everyone on this team is excited for this weekend.”

Frank Kimmel, left, and Ryan Newman speed past the start-finish line during last year's BPU 200 race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan.

It wasn’t just competitors who had rave reviews. NASCAR officials sounded pretty happy with the decision to head to the Midwest, which probably isn’t surprising considering the decision was theirs in the first place.

“Everybody in the industry was talking about how they were treated so well,” said Jim Hunter, NASCAR’s vice president for corporate communications. “The welcome mat was out. The guys found out what Midwestern hospitality is all about.”

The initial announcement that Kansas and Chicago were being added to the schedule in 2001 drew a loud groan from the garage dwellers.

It’s not that anyone had anything against Kansas or the Midwest. It was just that teams, drivers and owners had considered the schedule excessively crowded before the announcement.

For many, the decision to increase the schedule from 34 to 36 races was and remains a bad idea.

Driver Rusty Wallace, a native of St. Louis, said NASCAR should keep the Midwest events and eliminate a couple of races in the Southeast, which he considers saturated with NASCAR events.

It doesn’t make sense, he said, to have so many races within driving distance of each other and at “rinky-dink” facilities.

Virtually everybody agrees that NASCAR very much needs to grow its product into major markets like Kansas City and Chicago.

“From the time I started racing in ’86,” driver Michael Waltrip said, “we went to Watkins Glen for the first time, and since then, we’ve added track after track after track, and it’s nice to be part of that kind of growth.”

Teams will show up at Kansas with something they did not show up with last year notes.

All Winston Cup teams take notes when they visit tracks old or new. They use the notes for setting up their cars when they return the following year. Those Kansas Speedway notes are getting a pretty good going-over in the days leading up to Friday’s first practice and qualifying.

“We have a pretty good feel of what Kansas is like,” driver John Andretti said. “Last year, Kyle (Petty, his teammate and team owner) had tested at Kansas and he unloaded really well. And that got us rolling in the right direction.”

Then again, tracks change during a year. The surface weathers and seasons. Bumps can suddenly appear.

So while the notes will offer help, they don’t come with promises.

“I don’t know if anyone is going to be able to come into Kansas and be positive of what the track will be like,” Nadeau said. “All of us will have a good guess of what it might be like because we were all there last year. But there isn’t a guarantee that it will be the same this year.”

It definitely won’t be for Ince. No dirt.