Start your adrenalin, it’s Daytona 500 time
Steve Milton gears up with NASCAR springtime primer
ALTHOUGH THERE IS now an intriguing set of “playoffs” at the end of the year, stock car racing is still the only sport which opens its schedule with its biggest single event. The Daytona 500, the Super Bowl which
starts the season. And that is good prepromotion for smaller North American tracks which service the stock car fever of local fans.
“When Daytona is on, everybody is ready to go,” says John Casale who, with his brother Frank, has owned Flamboro Speedway since 1972. “It gets the racers ready to go, the fans too. They can’t wait. The adrenalin starts.”
Unfortunately, while the 500 whets the whistle, local tracks like Flamboro and Ohsweken Speedway have to wait a little while to blow it, since Ontario weather usually dictates they don’t open until late April or early May.
Still, the Daytona 500 — often held the same week that pitchers and catchers are reporting to baseball camps all over the rest of Florida — is one of sport’s traditional harbingers of spring and all that goes with it.
And it’s a reminder of how attached this continent still is to the internal combustion engine. The Daytona 500, and its sponsors, are noisy, paint-rubbin’ paeans to the auto industry supply chain.
Today’s NASCAR, which owns the Daytona, is not your daddy’s NASCAR. It’s not even Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s daddy’s NASCAR. Senior, for instance, never had to face competition from high-performance foreign cars, as current drivers have since Toyota got involved a little more than a decade ago, setting off jingoistic reactions all over the sport.
In the 15 years since Dale Sr. has been gone, the sport has become even more corporate and marketing-conscious. That’s a process that began in the early 1990s, was personified by the well-groomed, well-spoken Californian Jeff Gordon and famously irritated NASCAR’s longtime fan base in the mostly-rural south. They’re still mad and Gordon, a four-time champion, was booed by a certain segment nearly until his stellar career ended at the end of last season.
Sunday’s 58th edition will be Gordon-less. He has retired, but his familiar No. 24 will be in full view, in the pole position won by Chase Elliott, the 20-year-old scion of Good Ole Boy Legend Bill Elliott who won a pair of 500s.
The sport’s most famous track exemplifies what makes stock car racing so different than any other American professional sport. No Super Bowl or World Series MVP has ever been killed, or even close to it, during the Big Game. But Dale Sr., four years removed from his only 500 victory, died 15 years ago this week, on the final turn of the 500 and before he died likely saw his longtime friend Michael Waltrip finally win his first race and his son Dale Jr. finish second.
You can’t make that stuff up, just like you couldn’t make up the legendary fight between the Allisons (Bobbie and Donnie) and Cale Yarborough after the first televised 500, or the helmet swinging that still occurs in pit row a couple of times a year between millionaire drivers.
Despite the big-time money there’s a bit of an outlaw, and outrageous, feel to stock car racing dating back to its roots in moonshine-running.
North American drivers, especially those who brave freeway rush-hour every day, can identify with that kind of road rage, and there is a certain vicarious solace in watching someone else — someone else who’s a better driver than you — acting upon it.
While Formula One and Indy Cars are specialty vehicles, which is part of their appeal, the average driver feels more comfortable around stock cars, which are similar to their own wheels. That’s especially true at local tracks where there are several car models.
“People recognize the cars,” Casale says. “And that makes them identify with the racing. And at our track we have the real coupes, and that creates another level of interest with older fans.”
The Daytona 500 also enjoys a massive continentwide feeder system, for fans and for drivers that more “elite” brands of racing don’t have.
Every state and regional fair has at some time featured stock car driving, often featuring local drivers and wreck’em races, and there has been a rich history of small tracks dominating local Friday and Saturday night entertainment in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. And despite losing Cayuga and Barrie Speedway in recent years, Ontario still has about a dozen ovals in operation: with two (Flamboro and Ohsweken) close to Hamilton and another two (Merrittville and Humberstone) in the Niagara Peninsula along with Ransomville in nearby Lewiston, NY.
“I think Hamilton is in a unique position in terms of the sport of stock car racing,” says Erik Tomas, host of Raceline Radio. “To the north, east and west, you’ve got asphalt tracks (like Flamboro) and go to the east, and you’re into really good dirt-track (like Ohsweken) country.”
So people around here know stock racing and when NASCAR drivers make promotional trips for their sponsors, Hamilton is often on the itinerary.
But it’s not like it was a couple of decades ago, Casale says.
“We get around 1,200 at the gate now,” he says of Flamboro. “Back in the ’70s if you didn’t get to our place at a decent time, you couldn’t get a good seat. We filled the stands, which can seat 5,000, at one event in the early ’80s.
“The problem in the family entertainment business now is that there are so many things going on. In the old days there wasn’t as much and people would come to the track as a family on Saturday nights.”
Live Saturday night racing returns in late April, but in late February, it’s all about Sunday afternoon and the Daytona 500.