There was a time when the Daytona 500 was an actual race. You know, cars chasing each other down and passing on the track, managing tire wear, stuff like that. Real, actual racing. Not the demolition derby it is now. The Daytona 500 is NASCAR’s Super Bowl, the biggest race of the year, and winning it means absolutely nothing. Neither does winning the other race at Daytona, or any of the races at Talladega, or now Atlanta as well.
Atlanta was a perfectly serviceable mile-and-a-half oval until its owner, Speedway Motorsports, which didn’t have a super speedway of its own, decided it needed one. So it repaved Atlanta and tried to make it more like Talladega and Daytona. While it’s much shorter, the new Atlanta is serving its purpose, trying mightily to imitate the wreck fests that occur annually on its big brothers.
The green flag had barely dropped on the first Atlanta race last year when there was a 16-car pileup. In 2021, the last year Atlanta was a regular race track, there was just one wreck involving two cars in the first race. Combine that with the three-car wreck in the second race and you have just two incidents involving a grand total of five cars.
So what’s happened? And why? Denny Hamlin, one of stock car racing’s most articulate spokesmen and one of the few insiders in the sport not afraid to criticize NAASCAR, explained in one of his recent Actions Detrimental podcasts.
“We used to run 200 mph here (Daytona) and the cars were hard to drive and hard to handle,” Hamlin said. “The team that brought the best car that had a great setup under it had an edge. The giants of our sport that could navigate traffic and use it to their advantage had the best chance to win.
“That art is gone now,” Hamlin continued. “It’s just such a bleeping crapshoot now. It’s luck because you just have to avoid the wrecks. I hate the fact about how much luck is involved in NASCAR now. It’s just a matter of wrecks at super speedways and I feel like the Daytona 500 is a microcosm of our sport in general…
“It started with the competition group a decade ago when we started cutting horsepower because we wanted to look good on TV,” Hamlin went on. “We wanted you to think that they (the cars) can pass when they can’t really pass.” When a few cars got airborne, Hamlin said, NASCAR started reducing speeds to stop the flipping, and the lower the speed became the better the cars stuck to the track and the better the cars stuck to the track the more equal they became and the harder it was for one car to pull out and pass another.
This reached its zenith with the Next-Gen car NASCAR is running now. With teams no longer able to build their own cars and everybody using the same parts and pieces, and NASCAR allowing virtually no modification of those parts and pieces, there’s almost no difference between the cars on super speedways. That’s especially true because of the draft, which allows the cars to bunch up with the trailing car pushing the car in front and the car in front pulling the trailing car.
You can’t leave the draft by yourself, because then there’s no one to pull you and no one for you to push, which is why the cars form long lines which rarely break apart. And because the cars are all so close, you have the illusion that somebody might pass at any time, which they can’t, and that sets up the big wreck, which is almost certain to happen with the cars all running together.
So driver skill and team ingenuity play virtually no part in determining the winner. “The entertainment of it has far overtaken the sport of it,” Hamlin said. That’s why Michael McDowell, with two wins in his career, has won the Daytona 500. It’s why Ricky Stenhouse, with four wins in his career, has won the Daytona 500. His other three wins are also on super speedways. It’s why Austin Cindric, with two wins in his career, is another Daytona 500 winner.
All of this leaves you to wonder what NASCAR is shooting for here. True race fans are not interested in watching wrecks. They don’t want their favorite driver eliminated in a crash, like Chase Elliott was Sunday. Or Martin Truex. Or Kyle Larson. Or Kyle Busch and several others.
Like every other sport, NASCAR has sold it’s soul to television. This year, it starts a new seven year deal worth $7.7 billion. And television doesn’t care about the quality of the racing as long as it get viewers, many of whom are not real race fans. They are, as Hamlin pointed out, looking to be “entertained.”
And while NASCAR is genuinely interested in safety, it may have become a little bit complacent after watching drivers walk away from horrendous crashes like Ryan Preece did Sunday. NASCAR has the technical know-how to break up the packs that form on super speedways, to separate the cars, to bring back real racing. The question is, does it really want to?
While no one has been seriously injured – or worse – yet, and no matter how safe these cars appear to be, you can’t keep slamming cars together and hitting the wall indefinitely. You’re playing a game of Russian Roulette, and the hammer is not going to fall on an empty chamber forever.
Hopefully, it won’t take another Dale Earnhardt for NASCAR to figure that out.