DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — There was more uncertainty than usual when the spectator gates opened for NASCAR’s Daytona 500 on Sunday.
The recession had cost as many as 800 crew members their jobs during the three-month offseason. Storied teams like Petty Enterprises and Dale Earnhardt Inc. had lost lucrative corporate sponsors and been forced to merge with rivals to remain solvent.
And given the financial struggles of the typical American family, it was unclear whether NASCAR’s famously loyal fans would still dig into their pockets to attend the ballyhooed season-opener.
Amid lowered expectations on nearly every front, Sunday’s race was a solid success despite rain that halted the event 48 laps shy of its stated distance, truncating the Daytona 500 to the Daytona 380.
The 168,000-seat grandstands were filled to capacity.
The race was spiced by controversy — always good from a track promoter’s standpoint, especially when it involves the sport’s biggest name, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
And it produced an unassuming victor in Matt Kenseth, a no-nonsense racer who would rather bury his head under the hood of a car than see it splashed across a Times Square billboard.
Kenseth, 36, has neither the charisma of an Earnhardt nor the Madison Avenue polish of Jeff Gordon. But his small-town roots (he’s from Cambridge, Wisc., population 1,200) and lack of pretense resonate more easily with the average ticket-buyer.
Kenseth earned his Daytona 500 trophy with a pass on the high side of the 2.5-mile superspeedway, zooming past front-runner Elliott Sadler just before the rain called a halt to the race.
Monday morning at Daytona International Speedway, Kenseth’s crew members showed up to watch their No. 17 Ford be inducted into the trackside museum, where it will be displayed until next February Then the crew flew back to its North Carolina shop to work on racecars.
Kenseth’s heart went with them. But as Daytona’s newly crowned champion, he was obligated to fly to New York for the talk-show circuit before heading to Southern California for Sunday’s race.
“I’m not real big all into that,” Kenseth said of the media blitz in store. “I don’t mind doing it, but it’s not my main focus.”
While NASCAR officials no doubt would have preferred a winner with more star power, Kenseth is perhaps better suited to this moment in the sport’s history — a moment in which stock-car racing is gaining a new appreciation for doing more with less.
NASCAR has been through lean times before. And its decades’ old struggle for acceptance as a major sport spawned a breed of promoters and competitors that thrives on a challenge.
With ticket sales lagging for the 2009 Daytona 500, track officials slashed the price of backstretch tickets from $95 to $55 and touted the return of the $3 hot dog at infield concession stands.
Drivers quit complaining about the design and handling quirks of NASCAR’s winged race car and “shut up and drove,” as an unsympathetic promoter once urged.
Notorious for an ability to “monetize” nearly every aspect of stock-car racing, track owners topped themselves by selling corporate sponsorship of the caution periods for the first time in NASCAR history. At 19 NASCAR tracks this season, Memphis-based ServiceMaster Clean is paying for the right to haul off debris after wrecks. In return, NASCAR is re-naming its cautions “the ServiceMaster Clean Caution Period.”
And, in an odd twist, the rain actually improved the competition. Normally a three-and-a half or four-hour affair, the Daytona 500 often gets tedious after its first 50 laps, with drivers logging circuits around the oval single-file until what seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt liked to call “the money-paying laps.”
But Sunday, every driver in the field knew that a major rainstorm was headed toward Daytona Beach. So they battled for position from the start, fully aware that the race would be stopped the moment the massive front arrived and soaked the track. They managed to complete nearly three-fourths of the race before the rain started. At two hours 51 minutes, the show was plenty long to leave most fans feeling they received their money’s worth.
And the nine-car pileup on Lap 124 — triggered when Earnhardt Jr., who had veered off the track after being legally blocked by Brian Vickers, popped back on the asphalt and spun him out — gave commentators and fans plenty to argue about in the aftermath.
The wreck took out the dominant car, Kyle Busch’s No. 18 Toyota, which led 88 laps. It also collected two of team owner Jack Roush’s five Fords, with Kenseth’s No. 17 narrowly slipping through the billowing smoke and spinning cars unscathed.
Roush said Monday that he was so upset about the wreck — and presumably NASCAR’s decision not to penalize Earnhardt Jr. for aggressive driving — that he didn’t even realize NASCAR officials had declared the race over 17 minutes after the cars had been red-flagged and brought into the pits to wait out the storm.
Roush declined to elaborate on who he felt was to blame for the carnage or what action he thought NASCAR should have taken, if any, saying simply: “I was fraught with emotion, not believing what I was seeing.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
