Few sporting venues have the mystique of the Daytona Worldwide Speedway.
Since 1959, the two.5-mile monitor has served as house of NASCAR’s most prestigious race, the Daytona 500 — the primary race on the NASCAR Cup Sequence schedule (Sunday, 2:30 p.m. ET, Fox). The “Nice American Race” is persistently NASCAR’s high TV draw (h/t: Front Office Sports), maybe as a result of the inherently chaotic nature of the racing means destiny and probability usually have extra to do with figuring out a victor than the talents of a driver and his crew.
Drivers, after all, have to be no less than somewhat fortunate to win any auto race. However components they and their crews cannot management at Daytona make for what ARCA Menards Sequence driver Ryan Roulette described as “a recreation of chess” at 200 miles per hour. Seemingly mundane occasions throughout a race — a chunk of particles within the improper spot on a monitor, a wayward seagull putting a automotive or a bump draft gone improper — can decide the result of the Daytona 500.
Drivers and crew chiefs usually 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 is just not distinctive for its pack racing. It isn’t distinctive for crashes, both. Nevertheless, 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 usually triggered by the 20-plus automotive packs.
Lately, the “Massive Ones” have solely elevated in scale. In 2024, contact from William Byron, who gained the race, despatched Brad Keselowski round in entrance of your entire subject. The crash concerned greater than a dozen drivers, lots of whom have been left with nowhere to go because the wreck performed out in entrance of them.
The “Massive One” within the 2024 Daytona was brought on by a series response that began with a poor bump draft, a transfer that may win races if achieved appropriately and sprint desires if achieved poorly.
Bump drafting with a fellow driver within the improper spot on the monitor — in a nook, for instance — might be the distinction in whether or not or not your automotive comes again to the pits in a single piece.
