Dale Jarrett celebrates winning the Daytona 500 on February 20, 2000 at Daytona International Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
A lot can change in a decade, especially in NASCAR.
When the 2000 season began, NASCAR’s top division was still known as the Winston Cup, continuing a relationship that began nearly three decades earlier between the sanctioning body and North Carolina-based tobacco company R.J. Reynolds.
Dale Jarrett came into the season-opening Daytona 500 as the defending Winston Cup champion, and he didn’t disappoint, pocketing a cool $1,277,975 as he won stock-car racing’s biggest race for the third time.
Back then, things were a lot different in NASCAR. Each track negotiated its own television deal, and CBS, NBC and ABC each televised races during the season, as did ESPN, TBS and TNN.
Only General Motors and Ford raced in the Cup Series, with GM splitting its efforts between Chevrolet and Pontiac. Dodge was a year away from rejoining the fray and the idea of a Japanese-based automaker competing at the Cup level would have been viewed as sheer folly.
And, oh yeah, the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Raybestos Rookie of the Year Joey Logano was a 9-year-old elementary-school student in his native Connecticut. Not to mention the Cup champion was determined by how he did in the entire 34-race schedule, which began in Daytona and ended at Atlanta. Playoffs were something the stick-and-ball sports did, and there was no such thing as the Car of Tomorrow.
When the 2000 season opened, Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty were the only drivers to win more than three Cup championships, and Cale Yarborough the only one to win three in a row. The series raced twice a year at a 1.017-mile oval in Rockingham, N.C., and twice at Darlington, S.C., too. Texas, Phoenix and Southern California were places where the Cup series raced once a year, with Chicagoland and Kansas speedways both a year away from getting races.
What might be the most surprising difference between the 2000 Daytona 500 and the upcoming 2010 race is the turnover in drivers. Matt Kenseth, who is the defending race winner, is one of only two drivers expected to drive for the same team in the 2010 Daytona 500 as he did in 2000. The other is Jeff Gordon, who has been with Hendrick Motorsports for his entire career, just as Kenseth has remained with Roush Fenway Racing from his Cup debut on.
Of the 43 drivers who competed in the 2000 Daytona 500, no more than 16 are expected to enter the 2010 race, with only a dozen or so likely to run the full Sprint Cup schedule.
