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Thrilling finish to a long Daytona 500
By Jay Hart
February 15, 2010
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Years ago, Ken Squier dubbed the Daytona 500 “The Great American Race,” and until recently he couldn’t have been more right.
It is quintessentially American – really big, really fast, sometimes flawed, but most of all, anyone, when given a chance, can win – even Jamie McMurray.
Less than six months ago, McMurray was a driver with an uncertain future. He was in the last year of his contract with Roush Fenway Racing, and anyone with a pulse inside the Sprint Cup garage knew he was on his way out. Armed with a modest resumé, he went looking for a new job. There weren’t many to choose from, and ultimately he found one with his old boss, Chip Ganassi, whom McMurray left four seasons ago for the supposed greener pastures of Roush Fenway.
With his time at Roush coming to an end, McMurray had to go scrambling back to Ganassi at the end of last season. Less than three months later, in the first race of their reunion, they won the biggest one of them all.
“I’m not quitting again, just so you know guys,” McMurray said to Ganassi and co-owner Felix Sebates following Sunday’s 52nd running of the Daytona 500. “I’m staying.”
McMurray’s last-lap pass of Greg Biffle and his drag race to the checkered flag with a hard-charging Dale Earnhardt Jr. made for a thrilling finish to what heretofore had been an excruciating long day full of frustration. One hundred twenty-three laps into the race, a 15-inch-long pothole formed in the middle of Turns 1 and 2, turning the 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway into a parking lot. For nearly two hours, more than 150,000 fans at the track and millions of viewers at home were left to sit and wait and wait and wait as a repair crew attempted to fix the damage.
If this truly is NASCAR’s Super Bowl, then the scene was the equivalent of the NFL halting its championship game midway through the third quarter to mow the grass.
When the fix finally did come, it didn’t hold up long. Just 38 laps were run before front bumpers slamming the pavement opened the pothole again, prompting a second delay – this one 40 minutes.
“We inspected the track this morning, and there were no concerns,” track president Robin Braig said, adding that the first delay in repair was due to the 50-degree weather that had ascended on northern Florida.
TV was left to interview driver after driver who had vacated their cars, while the track PA found Larry the Cable Guy, who praised Daytona International Speedway for having “the cleanest port-a-potties.” Alas, the Great American Race had turned into the Great American Wait.
“Obviously the red flags are unfortunate; no one wants to see that,” NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said. “But hopefully what fans will really remember about this race tomorrow and years to come is that dramatic finish – that 88 [Earnhardt Jr.] cutting through the entire field, really having a great finish for the win and a great win for Earnhardt Ganassi with Jamie McMurray.”
Poston is right in pumping up the action – the record 21 leaders, the last-lap charge that ended in a nail-biting finish made for a great race when they were actually racing. And had Earnhardt been able to pull it off, the pothole would have already been knighted by Junior Nation.
But while drivers were quick to come to the defense of NASCAR and Daytona International Speedway, saying there is no way to foresee a pothole forming on the track, none of this will do anything to soften the PR blow. For the second year in a row, NASCAR’s biggest event failed to be what Squier dubbed it to be.
Last year fans left the track screaming about the swiftness with which NASCAR called the race because of rain. This year it was a pothole that took so long to fix that a race that started at 1:19 p.m. ET didn’t end until more than six hours later. And so once again, on the one day a year NASCAR gets its shot to crack the sports radio airwaves that are normally reserved for stick-and-ball talk, the discussion won’t be flattering. “We’re the world center of racing,” Braig said. “This is the Daytona 500. This is not supposed to happen.”
Of course, none of this bothered McMurray, who withstood a pair of Green-White-Checker finishes that stretched the race eight laps beyond its intended length. After getting his car stuck in the soggy infield grass while doing victory doughnuts, McMurray hopped out, laid face down on the turf and kissed the ground.
Despite the tarnish, it’s still hallowed; it’s still Daytona; and it’s still the one race a year where the winner cries in victory lane.
“I’m trying to be genuine and as sincere as I can and not sound cliché,” McMurray said. “As a kid growing up, this is what you dream of – of being able to win the Daytona 500.”
When asked how he was going to celebrate, he replied, “After [last year’s win at] Talladega, we went to McDonald’s. I think tonight we’ll have a Big Mac.”
Sounds just about right.
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NASCAR’s marquee attractions exit early
By Jay Busbee
February 15, 2010
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — NASCAR got a hard lesson in the perils of celebrity worship Saturday.
The Drive4COPD 300 was the most anticipated race in NASCAR’s “minor league” Nationwide Series in years, possibly ever. It marked the NASCAR debut of Danica Patrick, veteran of both IndyCar racing and provocative commercials. And it also marked the first opportunity for her team co-owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. to begin scrubbing away the memories of 2009, his worst season as a professional driver, and give his legions of fans hope that good days still lay ahead.
But both Patrick and Earnhardt ended up in race-ending wrecks within just a few laps of one another. And suddenly NASCAR found itself with a national viewing audience, but without its two marquee attractions.
Both drivers are far more famous as personalities than as drivers; their fan base and their marketing muscle far outweigh their on-track success. In her five-year Indy career, Patrick has run 81 races and won one. Over that same time, Earnhardt has run 180 Sprint Cup-level races and won three. Individually, they’re immensely desirable endorsers, so when the news came down last year that Patrick would be joining Earnhardt’s Nationwide team, you could practically hear the sound of NASCAR officials tap dancing with glee.
Still, the disconnect between both drivers’ performance and acclaim sends fans into fits. The hype over Patrick’s NASCAR debut had many fans, drivers and media members grumbling that her story was obscuring the feats of more accomplished drivers, in much the same way that Earnhardt’s every Sprint Cup move draws far more interest than anybody else on the track.
So while Saturday at Daytona International Speedway dawned with traditional opening-day excitement, the twin stories of Danica’s debut and Junior’s drive for redemption nonetheless dominated every corner of the track. And in the early going, it appeared that both storylines would play out perfectly.
Prior to the race, Patrick – who had been promoted to the Nationwide race as a result of a sixth-place finish at last week’s ARCA race – said her goals were to finish the race, avoid problems and learn something, all appropriately modest given the circumstances.
Patrick started the race in 15th, and while she drifted backward over the course of the first couple dozen laps, she nonetheless pulled off a deft maneuver to dodge a wreck that took out two cars on Lap 6. Earnhardt, for his part, ran at the front of the pack most of the afternoon, getting as high as second place behind the dominant cars of Kevin Harvick and eventual race winner Tony Stewart.
But soon enough, the cracks started to show. Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. gave Patrick on-the-job training, coaching her through the minutiae of a pit stop – unlike Indy Car, she couldn’t just punch the gas as soon as her crew finished – and teaching her the nuances of bump-drafting at 180 mph. She drove well enough, given the circumstances, but had difficulty with her car’s handling, and even stalled the car in the pits during one stop.
But just after the race’s halfway mark, Patrick couldn’t avoid trouble. A wreck involving Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Colin Braun took out Patrick. After a brief inspection, her team decided to load the car on the truck, forcing the wrecked No. 7 GoDaddy Chevrolet through a pack of media that numbered at least a hundred strong.
While much of the media focused on Patrick – “Don’t chase her, she will run away,” advised a JR Motorsports official – her boss was having problems of his own. On Lap 81, a promising run disintegrated when Earnhardt collided with Carl Edwards which began a violent series of flips that brought the stands to silence Earnhardt was fine, and soon afterward evinced a bit of gallows humor on the day.
“I had a lot of fun out there, but it was an expensive day,” he said. “I’ll have to go back and balance the books out there. It was an expensive day for JR Motorsports.”
Patrick was equally disappointed but, fundamentally, hopeful.
“It’s important to have realistic expectations,” she said. “There’s going to be spikes in performance, I don’t doubt that. But there’s also going to be tough days. And today, I would say, was more of a tough day.”
There’s one school of thought that suggests a day like Saturday is exactly what both drivers – Patrick, obviously, more than Earnhardt – need in order to set up for future successes. Any driver can look good with a favorable track and a solid car. The challenge comes in running well when everything doesn’t line up quite so neatly.
“She got a lot of laps in today, and that’s what needed to happen,” Stewart said. “It would have been a disaster if she’d been taken out on the second lap. But she got a chance to feel what it’s like to drive a bad car, and that could be even more valuable.”
For Patrick, this isn’t a devastating finish – she wound up 35th – or even an unexpected one. Nothing in Saturday’s race seemed to indicate that Patrick can’t get the hang of NASCAR.
For Earnhardt, though, this was yet another in his litany of setbacks; yet another frustration in a career that’s coming to be defined by its shortcomings rather than its successes. He’d wanted to start the 2010 Sprint Cup season on a high note, and he still can, but this surely isn’t the way he wanted to go into the Daytona 500.
Patrick and Earnhardt have done more to raise the profile of auto racing than any other drivers active today, and for that, everybody on the track and in the stands owes them both a debt of gratitude. Yet, in the end, the result for both is the same – another week without a victory, another week in which the hype doesn’t match the results.
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