On a scale of 1-10 I rate it a 2. The majority of the race was a sleeper right from the start….did we really need that much Keith Urban, Digger Cartoons and shots of tricked out car angles in the pre-race show?
The real action came after the race when fans got to face off on the Dale Earnhardt Jr. /Brian Vickers incident. That incident was a stupid waste of race cars, brought on partly by NASCAR’s Lucky Dog rule. These guys were a lap down and should have got out of the way of the big dogs…but instead they wanted to be the lucky dog.
One of the big dogs they collected was Kyle Busch. We will never know if he would have won or not …but he looked to have one of the strongest cars and going from leading the most laps to almost dead last had to have been heartbreak. I would have been Pi$#$d off …wouldn’t you having lappers take away not just a good finish, but a possible Daytona 500 win?
If anything like that would have happened at a local show…both drivers causing the wreck that wounded so many lead cars would have been penalized. But this is NASCAR and politics and public image is the concern.
That was shown even with the Joey Logano/Scott Speed incident. They showed very few angles of that wreck…settling for the fact that it was all Scott Speed’s fault. But was it really? Could the aggressive Logano been partly to blame by mixing up that infamous Daytona “air”?
And how about NASCAR under strong pressure of gentle rains calling the race for the sake of the fans? Some of those fans make an annual pilgrimage to Daytona , some of them spend over a week there…may wanted to see that race end in green if possible…it was the Daytona 500, right? NASCAR’s biggest race of the year! .
It’s a new NASCAR and maybe new fans don’t carry the same passionate fire burning inside them.
At least I was encouraged when a newly minted NASCAR fan watching the race in my living room asked , “Where is Inglebright? ” and asking “If Joey is in the 20 car what car is Eric in?” That told me right there that you don’t have to go to Daytona anymore to please the new fan…new fans could be a very good thing for grassroots racing.
Racing with a little more flavor will start up at Thunderhill right outside of Austin, Texas this March 14th with the USAC Midgets and the NASCAR West. And if you can’t make it, catch it on TV. Then on April 4, All American Speedway in Roseville will play host to two major events, the SRL SOUTHWEST Tour and the NASCAR Camping World West Series.
And who knows...there might even be an Eric Holmes or Jim Inglebright racing in one of these events...
