OK, folks, show’s over. Let’s move along.
Now the 2025 NASCAR season can commence.
Other sporting signs of impending springtime are a tad more subtle. Baseball sheds the winter cloak by inviting pitchers and catchers to Arizona and Florida, where the familiar smack of horsehide meeting cowhide warms souls. Eventually, the Masters arrives to fully usher winter to the curb, with a near-weepy Jim Nantz offering the eulogy/intro combo.
Nothing gentle about NASCAR’s hint of winter’s end. You get 40 (or 41) blasts of internally combusted trumpets, the Air Force Thunderbirds to shimmy your molars, and in this particular instance, an Air Force One fly-by.
Let’s try to put a bow on another Daytona opener.
DUMMY? Daytona 500: Kyle Busch, Jeff Gordon criticize Joey Logano for ‘dumb move’ in late crash
First Gear: All’s well at Daytona, until it isn’t
Let’s assume the drivers aren’t any better than they were a generation or two (or three) ago. Having said that, it seems you should give credit to the Boys in Aero as well as the folks at Goodyear, because the Daytona 500 operated in three-wide fashion for long stretches of time Sunday night, and without incident …
… Until the checkers were within sniffing distance.
A Big One, then another, and then the Final Big One with the white flag flapping and the checkers unholstered. A few things about that.
First, sometimes it’s just too difficult to assign blame. You just have to write it off as too many hungry folks fighting to get to the trough and running out of room.
Second, my goodness, how good fortune is sometimes the key to winning a big race. William Byron darts outside just as things go nuts to his left and runs to daylight.
Third, gotta ask. NASCAR’s race official didn’t push the yellow button during that last-lap mayhem. Notice? When there’s no apparent danger in doing so, it’s smart to let them race it out to the stripe.
But three days earlier during the second Duel qualifier, Erik Jones was spitting distance from the stripe when a crash ignited behind and they immediately flipped the caution lights. Jones won, but then he didn’t, because Austin Cindric was a whisker ahead when the yellow flashed.
It was only Thursday, but imagine that scene playing out on a Sunday, especially the sport’s biggest Sunday.
OK, one more thing. If Mike Joy ever writes a book based solely on his Daytona career, the title has to be, “… And they crash!” It was understated, but perfect.
Second Gear: Legacy Motor Club turns a corner (maybe)
Jimmie Johnson rummaged through the clutter there at the end and pulled up a third-place finish.
Teammate John Hunter Nemechek pocketed a fifth-place showing. Erik Jones skirted the final blast of sheet-metal carnage to grab a respectable 12th-place Daytona finish.
Considering where Jimmie’s team was a year ago, they left Daytona with some wind at their backs (lots of wind to be had out there Sunday, by the way). That must be a good sign, right?
Well, maybe. It sure beats the alternative, but hopefully everyone has learned not to put too much stock in the “plate-races.” Normally we’d suggest more will quickly be learned about a team’s abilities, but this week brings Atlanta, which itself became a plate-racin’ track a few years ago.
And then a road course in Austin.
As for 2025, we’ll have a solid view of where everyone stands after the ensuing six weeks before the Easter break in mid-April. Will Legacy be among those in good shape? Maybe, but it won’t be due to missing wrecks at Daytona.
Third Gear: Dale Earnhardt Jr. gets a taste from the Cup
As for maiden voyages into the deep end of the NASCAR pool, it was a fairly low-risk investment for Junior Earnhardt, whose Xfinity Series operation put together a Daytona 500 effort with Justin Allgaier at the wheel.
Junior got a car from Hendrick Motorsports and some funding from Chris Stapleton’s whiskey operation, so he didn’t have to take out a second mortgage to make it happen. Still, it was something to see Junior so over the moon when Allgaier found the fast lane and reeled in enough ground last Thursday to secure a Daytona 500 slot.
Junior’s JR Motorsports fields four Xfinity Series cars, including Allgaier’s 2024 championship ride, and has long said the Cup Series is too much of a financial commitment at this stage. The week at Daytona, which ended with Allgaier’s ninth-place finish, didn’t dampen Junior’s enthusiasm for a future Cup effort.
“I would love to do this,” Earnhardt told NBC Sports after the 500. “It’s where we belong. It’s where we want to be.”
However, those charters ain’t cheap.
“We can’t do it by ourselves,” Junior said. “So it’s going to take some good people that want to invest in something that I believe has a lot of value and a lot of potential.”
Sounds like a guy ready to make a sales pitch.
Meanwhile, did someone say charters?
Fourth Gear: The wheels on the legal bus go round and round
In the days leading up to the Daytona 500, NASCAR filed an appeal in the antitrust case brought by a pair of its Cup Series teams — 23XI and Front Row.
Several weeks earlier, a U.S. district judge granted the two teams an injunction that allows them to operate this season as chartered teams, which means they keep their guaranteed starting spots each week and receive a bigger slice of the financial pie than they would as non-charters.
“The district court’s injunction orders flout federal antitrust law; misapply the established rules governing the use of preliminary injunctions; ignore unrebutted, legally significant evidence; and have sweeping implications for NASCAR’s 2025 Cup Series season,” NASCAR’s appeal stated.
If you play this out to the bitter end, assuming a pre-trial agreement can’t be found, and consider what would happen if NASCAR lost at trial, you might find yourself looking around and saying, “OK, now what?”
Good question.
Could NASCAR simply disband the charter system and go back to the old ways of “independent contractors” and no guarantees? That possibility has been suggested by some onlookers, but if you think the current legalities are awkward, imagine the mess that would create.
— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Daytona 500 recap: NASCAR roars to life as Donald Trump comes and goes
