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“Nowadays, even if you’ve got the fastest car, the draft overcomes that and changes everything,” suggests Mark Martin. “When you make a move, what makes that move right isn’t what you did; it’s what the other guys around you did.”
So there’s the unpredictable element of luck: An experienced driver can be trumped by a rookie who’s in the right place at the right time. Last year’s 500 winner, Trevor Bayne, had never won a race before. Carl Edwards, Kurt and Kyle Busch, Jeff Burton, Terry and Bobby Labonte, and Tony Stewart have crafted major careers but have yet to win Daytona.
There is still another element that makes this kind of racing different. Because of the high speeds, close traffic, and restricted sightlines imposed by Daytona’s steep banking, drivers must enter into partnerships with spotters on whom they have to totally rely. No surprise that many European road racers have had a hard time transitioning to NASCAR. Formula 1, IndyCar, and Le Mans veteran Max Papis admits it took him two years to “turn the wheel when [his] spotter said so.”
“In Europe,” he says, “we were trained not to trust.”
Whatever the right or wrong of NASCAR’s emphasis on show biz and close racing, its packaging is brilliant. Take the event at hand: Grand as it is, and as much as Daytona has encroached on Indy’s status as the “big” race, it is presented as part of the package NASCAR calls “Speedweek.” Fans get 10 days of racing, not one. It starts with ARCA practice, then there’s the Budweiser Shootout (where this year Kyle Busch put on a show of brilliant “saves,” surviving two spins and going on to win, by mere inches, a race that saw damage to 22 of the 25 cars that started), then the Gatorade Duels to determine the starting grid for the 500, followed, in turn, by the Camping World Truck event the night before the Nationwide race, which precedes the 500. Sprinkled in between are driver-autograph sessions, access to a Rock Wall and Power Jump in the kids’ area, rock concerts in an amphitheater not far from a full-liquor bar, a Budweiser Clydesdale appearance, and driver intros before every race. The garage area is open to fans, and there is not one but several United States Air Force Thunderbirds flyovers that are so loud, with the F-16s so low, as to provide an adrenaline rush that has everyone, including the drivers, peering skyward, dizzily.
These guys know how to market. “Our fan base is tremendous,” explains Nick Kelly, NASCAR’s manager of business communications. “Dale Jr. uses a K&N air filter. You can, too. That’s what distinguishes us from the stick-and-ball sports. It’s a unique accessibility.”
As for the fans, their numbers began to swell noticeably on Thursday in anticipation of the Duels, and with them came the inevitable accompaniment of local Daytona Beach cops, staties, and sheriff’s deputies who’ve taken up positions at every intersection bordering the track, where they run their roof lights nonstop for no evident reason.
Starting Thursday, too, track officials have begun checking the undersides of cars with mirrors affixed to long sticks as the vehicles pass through the ticket gates, presumably checking for . . . bombs? Two days later, Saturday—even though it’s pouring—presidential candidate Mitt Romney makes an appearance at the drivers’ meeting, then goes to work shaking hands in the garage area. There’s no Rick Santorum, although it’s reported that the ex-Senator from Pennsylvania has the night before bought the signage rights for car No. 26 (it will finish 19th in the 500). None of the NASCAR staffers I’m with in the garages, taking shelter from the rain, knows how much the sponsorship deal went for, but one volunteers, “Not more than $150,000, maybe less.”
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Everywhere, you see proof of NASCAR’s aforementioned $1 billion–to–$3 billion figure for souvenir licensing: No. 88 Dale Earnhardt Jr. “Mountain Dew” jackets, “Go Daddy” coolers sporting the now ubiquitous image of the long-haired Danica Patrick, Tony “Smoke” Stewart T-shirts and caps—the stuff is everywhere, tens upon tens of thousands of these shrines to the sport’s heroes and divinities.
Everything associated with this race is big, whether it’s the endless masses of oversized people; the Hummers and Durangos with their glass packs and roof lights inching along in traffic; the high-dollar motor coaches parked in the infield festooned with life-size cutouts of favorite drivers; the yard-long, stringy beards of tough guys astride snarling Harleys; the painfully amplified blare of rock music; the 60-odd Fox cameras embedded trackside and inside the race cars; the hundreds of dour, over-serious media people; the length and skyscraper height of the front stands that beg to be compared with the Roman Colosseum.
This is something both phenomenological and physical. All of it is big, as in overwhelming, outsized, even a little alarming.
Did Bill France Sr. anticipate this? Of course he did. He probably dreamed about it like Lewis and Clark dreamed about reaching the Pacific. They didn’t call him “Big Bill” for nothing.
Inside the fenced and guarded broadcasting compound lying a hundred yards outside the track, in the shadow of the stands about parallel with where the front straight spirals into the 31-degree banking of Turn One—and within a quick run of two Porta-Johns—Fox’s control room is like the interior of a nuclear sub: dark, windowless, illuminated by the glow of three rows of eight monitors set into the wall above where producer Barry Landis and director Artie Kempner sit, now yelling commands to assistants, cameramen out in the field, graphics people in the next trailer, and to Pam Miller, the pit producer at the control panel just behind them. When she’s not dealing with Landis and Kempner, Miller is busy feeding orders to four reporters in the pits. It is madness but a practiced madness, not entirely formless, even though 10 minutes earlier, at 9:56 p.m., on lap 160, under a yellow caution flag, Juan Pablo Montoya lost control of his Earnhardt-Ganassi Target Chevrolet and struck a track dryer at the exit of Turn Three.
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