Is the Daytona 500 a dud?
Despite the fact they were at the front of the field, Ricky Stenhouse didn’t have control of the race and neither did Joey Logano, because nobody really controls what happens in superspeedway racing, but here they were, vying for the lead on the last lap of the 2023 Daytona 500 as cars crashed behind them.
A fitting climax to what this race, and superspeedway racing in general, are all about. You don’t need to be a good driver. You don’t need to have a good car. You just need to be lucky enough to avoid the “Big Wreck,” three of which had occurred in this event, taking out 38 cars, and lucky enough to be in the right line at the right time on the last lap, which Stenhouse was.
Driving for the obscure JTG Daugherty team, whose only claim to fame is that it was partially owned by former NBA star Brad Daugherty, Stenhouse got a push from Christopher Bell, edging Logano to take the checkered flag.
In 2024, Stenhouse won another superspeedway event, Talladega’s Yellawood 500, and in all, he has now won four. But he has never won a race on any other kind of track and never even been a serious contender to win one. And this is not unusual for many drivers who win on one of the three superspeedways, Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta.
The superspeedways produce shooting stars, drivers who flash briefly across the NASCAR stage and then fade back into the obscurity from which they came, because superspeedway racing is totally different than anything else and there is absolutely no correlation between running well on these tracks and being competitive on the others.
Kyle Busch, for example, has never won the Daytona 500 despite being one of the most talented drivers in NASCAR. He has two superspeedway wins, but even without counting those, nine times in his Hall-of-Fame career, Bush has won four or more races on regular tracks, equaling or exceeding in a single season the number of wins Stenhouse has in his entire career.
And with NASCAR shifting to the Next-Gen car, more and more drivers like Stenhouse are getting wins on NASCAR’s biggest venues. As a rookie in 2022, Austin Cindric had only run eight Cup races in his life before winning the Daytona 500. Since then, he has also won another superspeedway race, Talladega’s Jack Link’s 500 last year.
But despite the fact he is driving for Penske Motorsports, one of the best teams in racing, Cindric has struggled on normal tracks, where he has only one win, and his job is in jeopardy.
And then there’s Dennis Suarez, who won the 2024 Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta. Suarez has been bouncing around Cup racing for nine years, and off the superspeedways, he has found winning much tougher. He has won only one other race and was finally released last year by Trackhouse, his fourth Cup team.
Harrison Burton’s Cup career has been much shorter, but driving for the Wood brothers, he won Daytona’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 in 2024. Like the others, the fact that he didn’t have a dominant car and wasn’t really competitive didn’t matter at Daytona, but it showed up everyplace else and he never won another race, was let go and is no longer in Cup.
Of the 24 races on superspeedways since 2022, when the Next-Gen car was introduced, five, or almost 20 percent, have been won by drivers and teams which have never been a factor anywhere else.
That is in sharp contrast to the 120 races run on ovals or road courses, where the best teams dominate. Cars fielded by Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Penske Motorsports, NASCAR’s Big Three, have combined to win 82 of those events.
Trackhouse and 23XI, two teams just a step below the Big Three, have won 19 more. Out of 120 races, only four have been won by teams or drivers who have not really been competitive.
When the Next-Gen car was rolled out, NASCAR’s goal was to even the competition. All the teams got their parts and pieces from a single source supplier and they weren’t allowed to modify them in any way, so all the cars were basically the same.
This caused a huge problem on the superspeedways, where drafting plays a major role in the racing. In the draft, the lead car punches a hole in the air allowing the trailing car to move into the vacuum created behind it. That compresses the air between the two which makes both cars go faster.
The more cars you get running nose-to-tail behind the lead car, the faster all of them will go. This has led to long lines of cars, sometimes 10 or more deep, roaring around the speedway.
And because all the cars are equal and nobody can pass without help, everybody tends to stay in line. About the only time the line breaks apart is if somebody in one line feels another line has more momentum, drops out of the line he’s in and tries to squeeze into the other one.
This creates a gap in the first line, breaking the draft and slowing that line down, allowing the second line to charge into the lead. As cars move back and forth between lines, the lead moves back and forth as well, but it isn’t really passing in the true sense of the word.
The long lines are also the primary reason for the “Big Wrecks,” because with all the cars running so close together, if somebody gets in trouble there is less chance to avoid it.
But while superspeedway winners can come out of no where, that doesn’t mean the best cars and drivers don’t win. JGR’s Denny Hamlin has won the Daytona 500 three times. Hendricks’ William Byron, the defending champion, has won two in a row.
They validate their superspeedway wins by the way they run at other tracks, though, and drivers like Stenhouse, Cindric, Suarez and Burton don’t. So, while superspeedway racing can provide a lot of thrills, winning some of its biggest races, like the Daytona 500, doesn’t mean anything except that on this particular day, you lucked out.