The only thing missing from the Monday night Daytona 500 was James Taylor and Tom Cruise. We already have the Three Stooges as Grand Marshals..
However, as a movie drama the editing was botched. The lap 2 crash should have been put off till much later. Why would you cast a record champion, a rookie winner and an antagonist woman and have them out in just the second lap…? That doesn’t make hay for a good story.
But wait…! We get a fire explosion in the last quarter of the film! On top of that we get the most popular star into an “almost win” scenario at the finish!
What…!?
“And then… we flash forward from Victory Lane to the end of the season and the Earth implodes in December as the fire damaged pavement cracks open causing a world-wide chain reaction with John Cusack in a small plane…”
“Can we get George Clooney…?”
The Daytona 500 was hardly the start of the Sprint Cup season that NASCAR wanted. There was just too much drama leading up to the actual race and too much “weird” in the race itself. Rain stayed over Daytona setting the scene for a first ever prime time night event. It was a poorly written script as a movie which makes it comical as reality. We should have guessed when we saw Darrell Waltrip talking with the Three Stooges…
Lap two… Elliott Sadler and Jimmie Johnson are in the pack. It is still very tight as there hasn’t been any time for the drivers to begin to even find a groove. Sadler gets up on Johnson’s tail with a push… Johnson gets loose and noses the 48 Lowe’s Chevy into the wall at speed causing a hard brake and steer for everyone behind him. Young Daytona Winner Trevor Bayne clips and gets the undercarriage taken out in the rain-soaked infield. Kurt Busch, trying to redeem a blown 2011 season in a new car, was in the garage. Danica Patrick threaded the needle between two spinning cars but still sustained damage that put the GoDaddy #10 in the garage. David Ragan and the #34 were done. Johnson was done.
And that was just lap 2!
Jump ahead… 40 laps remain… Juan Pablo Montoya in the Target #42 Chevy had been in and out of the pits complaining of vibrations in the car. While still trying to get a handle on the problem it snapped and the car shot up the track into a jet dryer blowing debris. Fire, leaking fuel, an explosion and a two hour delay… Fortunately, both Montoya and the driver of the dryer escaped with only minor injuries. However, the questions were also blowing up Twitter and Facebook. Would NASCAR stop the race here giving Dave Blaney an ironic win? How can they fix the track after a jet fuel fire? When do the clowns come in…?
Well… NASCAR did redlight the race. Emergency and track crews did a fantastic job of containing the fire and resetting the track. Tide has a new commercial as a fuel soaker. The drivers did have concerns over the patchwork as the race restarted two hours later but it was somewhat off the groove and did not present any real issues.
The finish… for people still awake early Tuesday morning… saw Dale Earnhardt, Jr. in a slingshot position with Greg Biffle but couldn’t pull the juice to get to to the front on the green-white-checkered finish. Matt Kenseth in the #17 Best Buy Ford held the front spot to take the win. Ironically, it was also Greg Biffle who had hooked with Kenseth several times during the 500 that helped him stay in position to be up front at the finish. Earnhardt thought there would be a final lap push from Biffle also, but that push never came and Dale Jr. took the #88 Chevy across in the second spot with Biffle on his tail for third. Denny Hamlin and Jeff Burton rounded out the top five.
This was Matt Kenseth’s second Daytona 500 win.
Can we get a new script writer before Phoenix?
Too bad I didn’t remember the Three Stooges connection earlier. Now it starts to make a little more sense. Perhaps No-Doz was being handed out in the stands?