Daytona ~ Let’s Begin
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Seventy-one
years ago, when what is now the NASCAR Cup Series first raced at Daytona Beach,
it was in July on the beach-road course, not in February on the high banks of
Daytona International Speedway.
The
first season for what was then known as the Strictly Stock Division didn’t get
underway until June; Daytona was the second event. Fortunately, winner Red
Byron’s car passed post-race inspection, because the first race’s winner, Glenn
Dunaway, had been disqualified at Charlotte for cheating, and two straight
dumped winners might have put an early end to Big Bill France’s new racing
model.
For
the record, 28 cars started that race – three driven by women – and there were
nine different brands in the field. Byron earned $2,000 for his efforts, and 10th
place finisher Jack Etheridge took home $75. Officially, cars finishing outside
the top 20 received nothing.
This is from the 1952
race – more cars, but otherwise probably the same scene.
By
the next year, the Daytona race began the season, and it has done so for the
past 38 years, but it wasn’t always that way. From 1952-81, things were
different. In 1952, a race at West Palm Beach, Fla., opened the season three
weeks prior to Daytona. Then, in 1955, NASCAR began its oddball practice of
running races late in the previous calendar year and counting them toward the
next year’s championship; a long-gone track in High Point, N.C., opened the
1955 season with a race in November 1954 (races at West Palm Beach and
Jacksonville, Fla., also were run before Thanksgiving as 1955 events). By 1956,
there were four late ’55 races on the schedule, as well as racing at the old
Phoenix, Ariz., fairgrounds dirt track in January, a month before Daytona.
This is said to be
racing at the old West Palm Beach track
A
variety of tracks made up those before-Daytona races, even after the beach-road
course was replaced by the superspeedway in 1959, but that changed in 1963,
when Riverside International took a weekend in January. Races at the end of the
prior calendar year would continue until 1969, but Riverside became a staple,
and it would continue that way until the road course fell victim to what
developers call “progress” after the 1981 season.
As he did so much, Dan
Gurney leads the pack at Riverside
That
gave Daytona the full spotlight, and with the France family owning both the
track and NASCAR, there was no doubt but that further adjustments weren’t going
to happen.
People
who compare racing with other sports talk about NASCAR’s oddity of having its
biggest event – its “Super Bowl” – at the beginning of its season, but except
for long-season team sports, it’s really not much of an anomaly: the Masters,
Kentucky Derby and Indy 500 are relatively early in their seasons. That really
has to do with the weather, and you can race earlier in Florida than farther
north.
The
timing generally has served the sport well, though. Doubtless, the photo finish
for the 1959 Daytona 500 drew much attention to a second-tier sport competing
in the shadow of Indy cars, and the Cale Yarborough/Allison Brothers fight
after the 1979 race (televised live and available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mucSyo9yLLQ)
generally gets credit for drawing more attention to the sport than anything
else in its history.
The Yarborough/Allison
Brothers fight gave NASCAR what Dick Berggren called its first “water cooler”
race – people talked about it around the water cooler at work the next day
Conversely,
many see Dale Earnhardt’s death in the 2001 race to mark the beginning of
NASCAR’s decline, although attendance and other popularity indicators make that
a harder thesis to prove.
Last
year NASCAR made the curious decision to carry over the previous year’s aero
and other rules for Daytona, then begin implementing them, so the 2019 event
was “The Great American Race*” (with an asterisk). This year, we’re in limbo
before more dramatic car and schedule changes go into effect for 2021, so maybe
the odds are higher – if Daytona isn’t a good race, what else are we going to
use to generate interest in the season-before-the-season-of-change?
There’s
an effort to drum up interest around there possibly having one or two more cars
than starting positions, harkening back to the era when qualifying meant
something. But almost everybody with a serious following is guaranteed a
starting spot, so there may be a limit to how much excitement will build around
which ultra-underdog has to go home.
If
you want to see what how serious competing for a Daytona 500 starting position
can be, go back to 1971, when 65 cars raced for 40 spots in the field.
Here’s the start of the
first 1960 qualifying race – there were 37 cars
For
that matter, here’s how you can get ready for the 500 and give some
thought to how things have changed over the years and how they might change to
restore the luster the sport once enjoyed. There are Daytona 500 videos from
just about every era on YouTube, and if you watch a few of them, you might just
ignite your racing fever and give yourself some things to think about.
You
can go all the way back to the first 500 in 1959 – where you’ll see dozens of
photographers standing, unprotected, out in the tri-oval grass as the race
starts. My favorite is the 1963 race, when it rained earlier in the day, and
without Air Titans and such, the event began with large water puddles down pit
road. During pit stops, you can see hand-turned lug wrenches being used, with
drivers rolling their stock windows up and down. A 30-second pit stop is
considered a wonder.
To
me, a return to some of the more human elements of the sport would be a good
thing. You might disagree, but you should see some interesting racing on these
older videos, regardless.
With
any luck, it’ll tide you over until we start another racing cycle next month.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
A
week ago I wrote about the ill health of pavement late model weekly racing,
using dirt track sprint car racing as something of a positive alternative. Now
comes a story about Ford and Toyota entering the sprint car engine business,
long dominated by individual, relatively small-time engine builders working
with a Chevy engine design that goes back decades.
The
fear is that these new engines will raise the cost of a motor, already in the
$55,000-$65,000 range, and put lots of weekly racers out of business. The World
of Outlaws sanctioning body, whose rules effectively govern weekly sprint
racing as well, expressed confidence that those rules would keep anything awful
from happening.
Good
luck with that.
Car
counts in weekly sprint car racing are already declining, and more owners with
resources are picking-and-choosing events, rather than supporting any track
every week. This isn’t a positive trend.
It’s
all about money – the “American Way,” I guess – but when the money needed to be
competitive in a regular program at the local short track exceeds what nearly
everybody can afford, we’ve got a problem, whether it’s Cup racing or
4-cylinder "bombers” in a corn field. Eventually, it will hit all sports,
but I think racing might be the canary, and that little bird looks to me like
it’s having trouble breathing.