Few sporting venues have the mystique of the Daytona Worldwide Speedway.
Since 1959, the two.5-mile observe has served as house of NASCAR’s most prestigious race, the Daytona 500 — the primary race on the NASCAR Cup Collection schedule (Sunday, 2:30 p.m. ET, Fox). The “Nice American Race” is persistently NASCAR’s prime TV draw (h/t: Front Office Sports), maybe as a result of the inherently chaotic nature of the racing means destiny and likelihood typically have extra to do with figuring out a victor than the talents of a driver and his crew.
Drivers, in fact, should be no less than somewhat fortunate to win any auto race. However elements they and their crews cannot management at Daytona make for what ARCA Menards Collection driver Ryan Roulette described as “a recreation of chess” at 200 miles per hour. Seemingly mundane occasions throughout a race — a bit of particles within the improper spot on a observe, a wayward seagull hanging a automobile or a bump draft gone improper — can decide the end result of the Daytona 500.
Drivers and crew chiefs typically fret over how little they management throughout a race at Daytona. The most important culprits are the unforgiving, snarling packs created by drafting and violent, vicious “Massive Ones” — racing parlance for wrecks involving 10 or extra automobiles.
Daytona shouldn’t be distinctive for its pack racing. It isn’t distinctive for crashes, both. Nonetheless, the venue’s slender racing floor — 40 ft in comparison with Talladega’s 48 — makes it a lot tougher for drivers to keep away from crashes typically triggered by the 20-plus automobile packs.
Lately, the “Massive Ones” have solely elevated in scale. In 2024, contact from William Byron, who received the race, despatched Brad Keselowski round in entrance of your entire discipline. The crash concerned greater than a dozen drivers, a lot of whom had been left with nowhere to go because the wreck performed out in entrance of them.
The “Massive One” within the 2024 Daytona was attributable to a series response that began with a poor bump draft, a transfer that may win races if performed accurately and sprint goals if performed poorly.
Bump drafting with a fellow driver within the improper spot on the observe — in a nook, for instance — might be the distinction in whether or not or not your automobile comes again to the pits in a single piece.
