The Daytona 500 will always be a marquee event, and William Byron is talented enough to be called a two-time winner in NASCAR’s most prestigious race of the year.
But is it the most prestigious race anymore? Because some drivers might suggest that the Coca-Cola 600 or Southern 500 has taken that throne. And the Indianapolis 500 might like a word about what is truly “The Great American Race.”
The 2025 Daytona 500 was not a bad race, despite a nearly four-hour weather delay and a crash fest in the last 15 laps. But this schtick of overly aggressive late-race bumping leading to melee and overtime restarts is getting old.
Six of the last eight 500s have gone something like this:
Drivers just run — not race — but run 450 or so miles. Then drivers start to race for the final 50 or so miles. Then someone gets brave enough to try an ill-advised block or pass. Half the field gets wiped out. Deserving drivers who spent the whole day near the front end up in the garage. Then, the race goes beyond its scheduled distance. Then, some lucky driver who led 10 percent or less of the race wins.
It’s not just one thing wrong with NASCAR’s most famous event — it’s several factors that combine to make this iconic race fail to live up to the hype every year nowadays.
The cars are essentially spec. Everyone runs at the same speed, which makes passing more difficult in fields of 30-plus vehicles closer in a pack than ever.
The drivers’ mentalities are more daring and aggressive than ever. This is because the championship format emphasizes winning and because the cars are safer than ever.
Safety is a great thing! No one should try to argue that. But it feels like there is a complacency amongst the Cup Series drivers — one that reeks of a “nothing will happen to me” attitude, which is frightening.
In the last two years, Ryan Preece has had three violent crashes at superspeedway tracks. And thankfully, he has made a 100 percent recovery from all of them. But Sunday night’s crash he endured was a reminder that Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway can be lethal places. No NASCAR drivers have died in a crash since Dale Earnhardt Sr. in the 2001 Daytona 500, and Lord, please keep it that way.
But Preece’s wrecks, where he flies upside down and violently tumbles at over 100 mph, should not be taken for granted in terms of danger. For the last two decades, we expect drivers to be OK after a tremendous wreck, and that complacency needs to disappear.
“As a father and racer, we keep beating on a door, hoping for a different result, and we know where there’s a problem: at superspeedways,” Preece said. “I don’t want to be the example. When it finally does get somebody, I don’t want it to be me.”
He isn’t wrong. The superspeedways are dangerous, and drivers aren’t racing with the same wariness they had in the 2000s. While wrecking, he said he was thinking about his young daughter. Trophies and money are nice, but going home to your family will always be the most important.
It’s easy to beat the dead horse on this subject, but the inconsistency from NASCAR’s control tower is just about the most consistent thing about the sport. OK, I hear NASCAR when it says they were able to get vehicles to the cars that wrecked on the race’s final lap. And for that reason, the race stayed green until the checkered and yellow flags waved simultaneously.
But sometimes that doesn’t happen, and race control puts out the yellow before crossing the finish line. That happened in Thursday night’s second Duel race and cost Erik Jones a win.
On the one hand, NASCAR should be applauded for allowing drivers to get back to the finish line and not having a human — one who is capable of error like all of us — to press a button to illuminate yellow lights around the speedway to determine the winner, like last year’s 500. But because it’s happened before, it isn’t following a previous precedent. And that’s what gets under people’s skin. How does NASCAR be consistent but also fair? The sanctioning body is in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation because someone will have reason to be irked no matter what happens.
Stage racing on a superspeedway has caused fuel strategy to play a bigger part in races than ever before, and that has drawn the ire of fans. Teams don’t allow drivers to go 100 percent on the throttle, so the field is bunched up for most of the race, and for laps at a time, nothing really happens.
NASCAR should get a pass on this one. When cars are three or four wide lap after lap, that is a sight to behold. In Stage 1 of the Fall Talladega race a few months ago, the field was four-wide, and the grandstand spectators loved it. Fans saluted with their caps, waved their hands, and cheered because it looked like the whole field was giving their all on every lap right from the start.
In reality, that wasn’t the case, as groups of cars were stuck together because some drivers were conserving fuel and some weren’t. OK, but so what? The three and four-wide packs are intense to watch and entertaining. It’s also unique to NASCAR. When cars join in a pack at Daytona and Talladega, no other racing series on Earth can compete with it. It’s as visually and auditorily pleasing as a military air show on Memorial Day.
On Dirty Mo Media’s “The Teardown” podcast, one of the standout topics was Riley Herbst’s thoughts about how superspeedway racing has become stale in recent years.
The show’s co-host, Jeff Gluck, shared details about a conversation he had with Herbst after the race, who said he ran most of it at 60 percent throttle and then got told to give it everything in the final stint of the race. That’s the culture of Daytona and Talladega racing these days because of fuel mileage strategies and stages.
According to Gluck’s conversation, Herbst wonders why the race isn’t about 65 laps since that’s about as much as the field will try throughout the event.
The Daytona 500 should always be 500 miles, but Herbst has an uncomfortable but fair point. These best-of-the-best stock car racers shouldn’t just be riding around like Sunday drivers (no pun intended.) They should be trying to lead every single lap possible. Now if this were any time before the 2000s when cars weren’t engineered to such perfection that they could run qualifying laps for hours at a time, saving your equipment would not be an issue.
But the cars are too perfect these days, and there is no reason not to give 100 percent since this is the case.
How can the Daytona 500 find its magic again? There’s a lot of work to do, but a good way to start would be by finding ways to encourage organic finishes again. That’s when the sport’s best of the best can rise to the occasion when the checkered flag flies.
