Congratulations! We made it through the winter! This means that it’s time, like the groundhog in the story, to raise our heads slightly above the ground to taste the metaphorical direction of the equally-laboured metaphorical winds of racing. The Daytona 500 has arrived, and like the fickle, push notification addled dope brains that we are, we will all watch 200 laps of stock cars and make sententious proclamations about how NASCAR is declining or better than ever, what the race says about the season ahead, why Danica’s performance is existentially, epistemologically and ontologically meaningless, and whether or not laps 1 through 198 inclusive matter.
Does anything matter? We’ll find out this, and more, over the next 96 hours!
Schedule
Daytona has a big and complex schedule, by which I mean of course that they race on a Thursday as well. Thursday (tonight) is Duels Day, and far from a violent spectacle of cane-beatings and eye-gougings aimed at expiating the honour of outraged Southrons, it’s actually a pair of qualifying races that sets the grid for the Big Race on Sunday in a complicated way that I do not care to remember. The first one starts at 7pm EST. The second is at 9pm. So much for that, Eurofans.
Friday means Trucks. If you like trucks, this is the day for you. Race starts at 7:30pm. They race for 100 laps and at the end the winner gets a year of free fried chicken and informed that he’s being replaced by a self-driving haulage unit. O tempora! O mores!
Saturday is Xfinity Day. Race starts at 2:30pm and is officially and bafflingly called the PowerShares QQQ 300. These are little NASCARs, although confusingly they’re driven by the same people without the help of a shrink ray. The winner gets zero credit.
Sunday is proper racing day. It’s the Daytona 500, and you’re supposed to remember the result of this one so that in the butchered words of John Prine you’ll have something to hold onto when the years flow by like a broken-down dam. Race starts at 2:30pm, which is 7:30 in the UK and probably even later than that in the Rest of Europe.
Anyway, it’s all on some Fox channel or another. If you’re in the UK, the race astonishingly is on Freeview so you have no excuse not to participate (in the thread).
Runners and riders
Now I am no NASCAR expert. I think plate racing is something you do at an all-you-can-eat buffet and that Tiny Lund was a character from Dickens. However what I can do is read an entry list and connect it to the racing-related factoids that glide over the wasteland of my mind like so many vengeful ghosts.
Starting on pole for the 500 is Hendrick Racing’s Alex Bowman. Who? He’s one of NASCAR’s under-30s. They will undoubtedly be a theme in this race and all the races hereafter. Won an Xfinity race in the back end of 2017, which was his first stock car victory since 2012, back when he raced in the ARCA farm series. He wasn’t literally racing on a farm as this isn’t the 1930s. Anyway, according to the chyron below he replaced Dale Earnhardt Jr, if not in our hearts. Alongside him is the more predictable mediocrity of Denny Hamlin, still driving one of Joe Gibbs’ Toyotas.
Want some more under-30s? I give you William Byron, Erik “Bloodaxe” Jones, Daniel Suarez, Voodoo Kyle Larson, Chase “T.S.” Elliott, Fightin’ Joe Logano and the Irritating Dillon Brothers. There’s also some kid from Tennessee called Trevor Bayne who won the race a few years ago but we will choose not to speak of him.
Last year’s winner, Kurt Busch, and last year’s champion, Martin Truex, “qualified” somewhere in the middle of the pack, not that they have yet qualified anywhere in any meaningful sense. Family favourites Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski are also in the race, and one of them will inevitably win.
That’s enough bullshit. And I use that word advisedly. The Duels start in a few hours’ time, so hold onto your grits and say a Southern prayer to the ghost of P.G.T. Beauregard, as we’re heading south of the Chickahominy for the Greatest(est) Spectacle in Racing!
