Daytona delivers a familiar scene
In a very abnormal year, normal finally got its moment Saturday night at Daytona.
A big wreck was followed by another big wreck in the closing laps. Followed by another wreck on the second lap of a two-lap overtime.
Oh, and one more as William Byron, leading the pack and well ahead of both last-lap spins, crossed the checkers for his first career Cup Series win as fireworks filled the sky above the backstretch and never seemed so redundant.
“It’s amazing,” Byron said after climbing from the winning No. 24 Chevrolet. No, at Daytona, it’s the norm.
Byron was among three drivers who were sitting on the playoff bubble entering this final event of the 26-race regular season. He didn’t sneak into the playoffs, but instead became the latest racer to get his first career win in Daytona’s Coke Zero Sugar 400.
This maiden voyage to Victory Lane shouldn’t be considered a surprise, however, because Byron came into the Cup Series three years ago with healthy expectations and cars prepared by blueblood Hendrick Motorsports. Ninetyeight starts later, he’s a winner. “Just extremely blessed,” he said. “It’s been a hard couple of years in the Cup Series.”
The one downer, for many: Seventime NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson will miss the playoffs after sliding off the wrong side of the bubble Saturday night. He caught too much of the second Big One and finished 17th in a damaged car, missing the playoffs in his final full-time season.
Two weeks ago, NASCAR made an impromptu trip to Daytona for a roadcourse race to fill a gap in the revamped 2020 schedule. It was a very different scene for everyone involved, since it was NASCAR’S first laps on the road course best known for sports-car racing.
Saturday night’s scene was very familiar and, in retrospect, quite predictable. The first 151 laps of the 160-lap race were clean and quite entertaining, with a variety of different leaders and plenty of give-and-take throughout the field. But when the witching hour nears at Daytona, drivers tend to grow fangs and throw caution to the wind.
The first Big One had 10 unlucky participants. The next one had 11.
Each had plenty of witnesses.
The Speedway traditionally doesn’t release attendance figures. The frontstretch grandstands, with reportedly 101,500 seats, appeared about 20% full Saturday, with fans scattered here and there for about a mile from east to west – distancing was dictated by making only certain seats available in each section.
RVS filled a large part of the area inside of the west banking and the area alongside Lake Lloyd, bringing the estimated attendance to 25,000. It’s the largest gathering of people in Florida – or maybe anywhere in America – since the PGA Tour was in Florida in February and early March.
One bit of the ol’ familiar was happily missing: Jet dryers.
Somehow, a couple of approaching rain storms – one before the race and one during – skirted the Speedway. On radar during the early stages of the race, a storm cell hitting areas south of the track appeared as if it reached to within a par-4 of Daytona’s backstretch.
Summertime racing at Daytona has a wet recent history, but Saturday night the clouds showed mercy, which might be symbolic of NASCAR’S ability and good fortune to salvage its 2020 season and get back in sync with its original schedule.
From here, NASCAR’S Cup Series opens its playoffs next week at a track that actually dwarfs Daytona in terms of racing history – Darlington Raceway, which opened in 1950 and predates Daytona International Speedway by nine years.
The season will conclude in early November in Phoenix, and assuming nothing happens to interrupt the schedule again, 2020 will eventually be looked upon as the year NASCAR pulled an ace from its sleeve. The ability to cobble together a schedule and finish all 26 races of the regular season, and presumably the next 10, isn’t something that will be soon forgotten.
The adaptability and creativity needed to get it done could serve the industry well as future schedules and race-weekend procedures likely take the sport in directions very different from its age-old practices.
Locally, the World Center of Racing will next be in the spotlight when the international sports cars arrive in January for a weekend of testing followed by the Rolex 24 the next weekend.
How that will look will be determined by factors beyond NASCAR’S control. But imagining a Rolex 24 weekend without the wall-to-wall humanity is as difficult as imagining next Saturday’s Kentucky Derby with an empty Churchill Downs.