The Daytona 500 Sucked!

And NASCAR is going to keep sucking, too.

Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series 61st Annual Daytona 500
Getty Images

So far this year, two months into 2019, sports in America have sucked. The NCAA football championship game was a snooze, the Super Bowl was awful, and the NBA season is all about tanking teams and obscure trade intrigue. Then along comes the Daytona 500, and if anything it was even worse. In fact, it was the worst 500 ever run at any track in the state of Florida. And the reason why the race was so lousy is the same reason those other sports have grown so crappy: There's an ongoing war against excellence.

That NASCAR has lost much of its cultural resonance isn't news. YouTube is full of videos showing with geometric logic exactly where the sanctioning body went wrong. The newspapers would be filled with NASCAR death notices if anyone at a newspaper cared about NASCAR or if anyone still read newspapers. But they miss the point. NASCAR exists in the context of the American sports and entertainment industry, and it's subject to the same commercial and political currents that affect every other sport. And it's killing all of them. NASCAR is just dying quicker than most.

Car and Driver

Sports in America have never been solely about competition. The "championships" chased in all these leagues are all ultimately meaningless. Only hard-core fans remember who was champion five, 10, or 50 years ago. What matters to fans is seeing extraordinary athletes exceed expectations in spectacular ways. An excellence us fans can't achieve.

For basketball, that's LeBron James doing a rundown shot block. For other sports: It's a leaping, one-handed catch by Odell Beckham, Jr. It's Dick Weber rolling 300, Secretariat by 31 lengths in the Belmont Stakes, Nolan Ryan throwing a no-no at age 44, and Tiger Woods draining clutch putts in a final round. It's great performances producing legends. It's not all about packs of competitors jockeying to be a nose ahead at the end.

A 500-mile NASCAR superspeedway race used to develop along dramatic lines. From the green flag, cars would immediately start dropping out as overstressed components failed. As engines blew, drivers experienced brain farts, and luck played out its havoc, the story of the race would develop. In the 1976 Daytona, David Pearson and Richard Petty had the field covered by two full laps. Then, coming into the tri-oval on the last lap, they crashed into each other and spun into the infield. It was Pearson who got his Mercury restarted to take the win while Petty's Dodge needed a push to take second. It's one of the greatest races ever, and the reason is that Petty and Pearson were clearly better than all the other entries. It was their dominating excellence that produced the drama. A story worth retelling 43 years later.

Parity ruins excellence. And without excellence there's not much reason to watch NASCAR.

But NASCAR has sacrificed excellence on the altar of parity. Every element of the cars is spec'd to the point that teams essentially can't tweak them for any useful advantage. Every car has the same chassis setup, the same tires, the same aerodynamics, the same gear ratios, and an understressed V-8 that won't fail and makes pretty much exactly as much power as every other V-8 on the track. So in this year's 500, for the first 190 or so laps not much happened. Despite the goony "stages" that no one understands, and whose winners were decided essentially by sheer happenstance, there was never any dramatic development. Every driver, every car, and every team was the same.

Professional sports is about storytelling. And those stories are only worth telling if they're about outstanding people and excellent performances. But NASCAR, by overregulation and enforced parity, has foreclosed all that. No more legends about a family from Level Cross, North Carolina, campaigning a blue car that wins 27 races during 1967. No more "Mystery Motors," Hemis, and SOHC engines. No more Ernie Elliott building a Ford small-block so powerful that his brother Bill could chase down and pass the entire field after falling two laps down—without the help of any cautions—during the 1985 Winston 500 at Talladega.

Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series 61st Annual Daytona 500
Getty Images

Theoretically, Denny Hamlin won the 2019 Daytona 500. But he was just the first corpuscle ahead of the clot. He did nothing to demonstrate excellence. He was lucky to survive the carnage. No drama at all.

Fairness is fine. But parity ruins excellence. And without excellence, there's not much racing worth watching.

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