NASCAR

Sprint Cup

JENSEN: A Good Start

So far, so good...

Tom Jensen | Posted February 08, 2010 Daytona Beach, FL

SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)

The Big Dance doesn’t happen until Sunday, but Daytona Speedweeks certainly got off to an interesting and positive start.

There was no cheating controversy this time around, no drivers punching each other out, no screaming about the rules package or crew chiefs behaving badly. Just a bunch of guys — and in the case of ARCA, guys and gals — out racing around the high banks of Daytona International Speedway, which is a beautiful thing indeed. The Budweiser Shootout was a good race and the new aero/restrictor plate combination seems to work just fine, as does the hands-off attitude of NASCAR officials towards bump drafting.

All good, so far.

But it’s time to issue the obligatory, pre-Daytona 500 disclaimer: What happens in Daytona stays in Daytona. And by that I don’t mean what goes on late at night at Lollipops or the Boot Hill Saloon or Dirty Harry’s. No, I mean what happens on the track at Daytona.

Daytona is a very unique track, a place where the results each year tend to be very different than those at, say, Charlotte or Atlanta or Texas. Or, for that matter, Bristol, Richmond and Martinsville.

The results of the Daytona 500 almost never carry over to the other 35 races of the year. In each of the past two seasons, for example, the winner of the Daytona 500 and the runner-up have failed to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup that season.

Kevin Harvick, the 2007 Daytona 500 winner, has won two Budweiser Shootouts since then but not a single Sprint Cup points race. In the last 12 seasons, only once has a Daytona 500 winner gone on to claim the Cup championship in the same season.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with Daytona, it just means don’t take whatever happens next Sunday — good, bad or indifferent — as a leading indicator of the season ahead. It’s more like one of those diet infomercials where they show you a picture of some man or woman who allegedly lost 150 pounds and follow it with tiny print that reads “Results not typical.” That’s the Daytona 500. It’s its own animal entirely.

All of which is a polite way of saying if Dale Earnhardt blows up and finishes 43rd, it’s not proof that’s he destined for a bad season. Nor does it mean that if he laps the field two times over next Sunday and wins the race that he’s bound for glory. It just doesn’t work that way.

Don’t believe me? Last year’s top-10 finishers in the 500 consisted of Matt Kenseth, Harvick, AJ Allmendinger, Clint Bowyer, Elliott Sadler, David Ragan, Tony Stewart, Michael Waltrip, Reed Sorenson and Martin Truex Jr. Of those 10 drivers, Stewart was the only driver to qualify for the Chase when the Cup’s 26-race regular season ended. The rest finished 14th or worse in points at year-end, including Sorenson and Waltrip, who wound up 28th and 33rd, respectively. Ouch.

The flip side was that five drivers who finished outside the top 25 in the Daytona 500 went on to make the Chase, including eventual series champ Jimmie Johnson.

Personally, I like the unpredictability of Daytona. It’s a race where figuring what the likely outcome will be is exceedingly difficult, because it all comes down to being in the right place at the right time to get a push with the race on the line.

The good news is that pretty much everything we’ve seen so far seems to suggest that it ought to be a classic Daytona 500. We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?

See you in Daytona!

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Tom Jensen is the Editor-In-Chief for SPEED.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing.

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Tom Jensen

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