Never a sport to allow its own horn to go un-tooted, NASCAR is really outdoing itself in the runup to the 2021 campaign. “Best Season Ever,” it is advertising. That after having just spent a year racing in the grip of COVID-19 – the mother of all restrictor plates. And it’s not as if the virus is in any hurry to round up the kids, pack up the camper and leave the infield.
It’s all so highly speculative, seeing how the sport hasn’t yet even thrown out the traditional first wreck at the season-opening Daytona 500, coming Sunday afternoon.
The Best Season Ever thing is based in large part on the oft-disputed assumption that change is good. NASCAR is trying on more different looks than Lady Gaga with some high-profile alterations to its schedule, ownership and style of racing. And just a year from now, it will unveil a new next-gen car designed with cost-containment in mind. Just a matter of time before NASCAR goes hybrid, if you can imagine. From there, who knows, maybe hands-free driving?
Change always sparks discussion. To some driver’s minds, it has created an almost kinetic energy in 2021.
So said Kurt Busch: “This is the first time I’ve seen as many changes since 2001 with new venues and new tracks with new schedules. Overall, it’s a good, refreshing time right now, and I love the tag line of greatest year ever in NASCAR. It seems that way.”
Given the optimistic tone in generally pessimistic times, here are six questions going into this NASCAR season of trying to be better and hoping for the best:
Who and how many will be left running at the end of Sunday’s Daytona 500?
NASCAR’s biggest race has become it’s most accident-prone. It essentially is a coin flip as to whether those starting the race can finish it (52% of the field has been running at the end of the past two Daytona 500s, not counting the banged-up cars limping to the finish). Ryan Newman was caught in a monster of a crash at the close last year, one of the ugliest in decades, which almost miraculously cost him only two days in the hospital.
Denny Hamlin will be going for his third consecutive Daytona 500 win, and fourth overall. He’s holding his breath.
“It is a skill game, but sometimes you get unlucky in the skill game. The hammer hasn’t hit on us yet,” Hamlin said.
“It being the Daytona 500, you know how it’s going to end,” 2015 Daytona 500 champion Joey Logano said.
Because the race is so important, Logano said, “Everyone ends up being ultra-aggressive, aggressively blocking, bumping each other very hard, and the next thing you know cars are sideways going across the field. It’s going to happen again. No doubt.”
Bumper cars at 180 mph. Heck of a way to start a season.
Atlanta Motor Speedway gets back its second race this year – what will the two look like?
“Obviously for me the most exciting thing coming to NASCAR in 2021 is the second race is coming back to Atlanta Motor Speedway,” AMS GM Brandon Hutchison said. What, you were expecting him to say it was the new race in Nashville?
The schedule reshuffle has meant a return of a summertime AMS race, after having lost the date in 2010. Last season simply was a bowl of soggy Frosted Flakes. First the lone Atlanta race was postponed by the start of the pandemic, then held later with no fans. This March 21, they are planning on staging the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 with 35% capacity in the grandstands (approximately 16,000 souls) with weekend RV camping only in the infield.
AMS will be a barometer on where the world is heading in conquering the coronavirus. For the hope is to have as much as 70% capacity available for the July 11 Quaker State 400 Presented by Walmart. If there are issues with that, it’s a sign we have bigger problems than one underpopulated NASCAR race.
Now that AMS has its second race back temporarily, can it hold onto it for the future? “If everybody who has asked me over the past decade if Atlanta was going to get its second race date back will now come support that race, it will be hard for it to ever go away,” Hutchison said.
Can an inanimate automobile be like Mike?
As the circuit’s lone Black driver, Bubba Wallace was enmeshed in the social-justice movement last season. This year, he’ll be working from a little different platform. Exiting Richard Petty’s team, he’ll be driving the No. 23 car for a fellow who made that number globally famed. Michael Jordan, yes, that Michael Jordan, co-owns the team with Hamlin.
Elsewhere on the strange-bedfellow front, entertainer Pitbull is dabbling in car ownership, going in as part owner of the new Trackhouse Racing outfit, with Daniel Suarez on the throttle.
Whether they can competitively stand up to the powerful established teams is highly questionable. But in the short term, any buzz is good buzz.
“We have a big platform. Michael Jordan has a huge following. That following is now having an interest in NASCAR,” Hamlin said.
“We’re running a race team, but it’s also about a bigger message,” Hamlin added. “It starts from the executive side where we’re extremely diverse. I believe we can continue to push change. ... If that opens up the fan base for NASCAR it’s going to be better for everyone.”
What’s with all these right-hand turns all of a sudden?
Much of the preseason prattle has centered on one new event, the March 28 Food City Dirt Race at Bristol. For the record, Food City Dirt is not the name of the world’s least popular grocery item. No, for one race they will cover the short track in clay and run a Cup race like it’s a Saturday night at Dixie Speedway. It has been 50 years since these guys have played in the dirt.
But the more significant mutation of the schedule is the addition of road courses in places like Austin, Texas, and Elkhart Lake, Wis. They’ll be running the road course at Indy this year. All more than doubling the number of road races, seven all told.
“I think this year more than ever you have to be a well-rounded race-car driver,” Logano said. “You have to be able to be a great road racer. You have to be good on superspeedways. There are still mile-and-a-halves and short tracks and even a dirt-race now. It’s very attractive for me to want to race in NASCAR because you don’t do the same thing every week.”
So, why not just hand another Cup championship to Chase Elliott?
First off, it doesn’t work that way. True, seeing how Elliott has won NASCAR’s past four road races, this schedule change seems a great boon to the young reigning Cup champion from Dawsonville. But winning more races doesn’t translate to a title according to NASCAR’s eccentric accounting. Ask Kevin Harvick, who won nine times last year and didn’t even make the final four.
Secondly, Elliott refuses to hear such talk.
“There’s not been one part of me that watched the schedule change, saw seven road courses and thought, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it now.’ That’s just not how I am,” Elliott said.
“I really don’t care where we go. At the end of the day, you have to be good everywhere, and I want to be good everywhere.”
Will any of it matter?
“We want fans, we want eyeballs (on the product), we want them to know that NASCAR has made some bold moves,” AMS’s Hutchison said.
That NASCAR’s TV ratings were fairly flat last year was seen as borderline encouraging, as there was a big falloff in viewership across multiple sports in the year of COVID. The average viewership of just more than 3 million for Cup races last year remains well off the peak of more than 8 million in 2005.
Some mid-week makeup races last year did particularly poorly in the ratings. Race fans gotta work, you know. And last season got off to a bad start when the Daytona 500 had to finish on Monday because of weather. The early forecast is for a 70% chance of rain Sunday afternoon
But as ever, the alternate fuel for this sport here in NASCAR’s 73rd season is optimism.
About the Author
