The Two Best Reasons For Watching The Daytona 500

You’d think NASCAR would have been fired up to do something to spice up its premier event, the Daytona 500, after television ratings of the race swooned by 20 percent a year ago to an all-time low. But Big Bill France or his son Little Billy don’t run NASCAR anymore.

The abandonment of NASCAR is a tired (but ongoing) story, but it seems as if the biggest race on the NASCAR schedule — the first Cup race of the year, the so-called “Great American Race,” the race that drivers want most to win — is generating hardly any buzz this year.

It never made a lot of sense to lead off the Cup schedule with the Daytona 500 rather than serve as its championship race, but there were benefits, namely that the race has a spot to itself on the sports calendar, and looking at something happening in Florida on TV in February is very pleasant.

And there you have the two best reasons to watch the 61st Daytona 500 on Sunday.

Big Bill France put the Daytona 500 on the racing calendar where it is because the annual car race on the beach there had attracted a lot of snowbirds at a time of year when the winter is getting really long up north.

The Daytona 500 also served the purpose of launching a new season with a bang, generating interest in stock-car racing well into the meat of a 10-month season. As it gained fame, a Daytona 500 victory was as big, or almost as big, as winning a Cup championship.

The Daytona 500 is still a big deal within NASCAR. Outside? Not as much. As stock-car racing is gauging how it will drive into a new decade (one that will hopefully include racing of other than gas-powered cars), the Daytona 500 is not a sleek vehicle for latching onto new fans.

The Daytona 500, which will be televised again on Fox, will have the same rules package so it will look like virtually the same race it was a year ago, when Austin Dillon prevailed in a wreck-filled race. Only after this race will restrictor-plate racing exit the sport, and, hopefully, the era of The Big One.

After one of its drivers, Joey Logano, won Ford’s first Cup championship since 2004, the manufacturer will debut a new race car, the Mustang, to compete against Chevy’s muscle-car brand, the Camaro — which, oops, struggled to win races in its first Cup season last year. It would be a stunner if a Chevy driver from Hendrick Motorsports, like, say, Jimmie Johnson, did not win the race.

Other than 2017 Cup champion Martin Truex Jr., who moved from the shuttered Furniture Row Racing team to Joe Gibbs’s formidable team, not many elite drivers changed jobs in the offseason, unless you want to count Kurt Busch.

There will still be the annoying “stages” that basically serve to trick up the competition, extend races that are too long anyway, kill all of the momentum and — almost forgot — allow more commercial breaks. Last year’s race, extended by 18 miles, took 3 hours 26 minutes.

Fox has replaced the crusty master of ceremonies Chris Myers with Shannon Spake, a very good move, but it is trotting out the same broadcast team for the race: play-by-play man Mike Joy with analysts Darrell Waltrip and Jeff Gordon, both former winners of multiple Cup championships.

Ol’ DW just celebrated his 72d birthday. When a fan asked him on his Twitter page recently if he’d be returning to Fox this year, Waltrip cheerfully replied, “They still need `old guy’ wisdom, I’m happy to say that for another year that `old guy’ will be me!”

Waltrip will happily provide the “Boogity, boogity, boogity” call and other country-fried racing aphorisms on Fox’s Daytona 500 telecast for the 13th straight year and 16th time overall. This will be the 40th Daytona 500 for Joy, 69, who called 13 Daytona 500s for CBS. The 47-year-old Gordon will continue serving as the whippersnapper in the booth.

Since the seating capacity at Daytona International Speedway was reduced to 101,500 after a $400 million makeover, the Daytona 500 has sold out in each of the last three years. But the sellouts were announced the day before the 2017 and 2018 Daytona 500, compared with five days before the race in 2016. Tickets are still available at the speedway’s website.

In 2006, when NASCAR crested the wave, an estimated 200,000 watched the Daytona 500 in person, according to Racing Reference. The telecast of the 2006 race on NBC drew 19.355 million, compared with 9.297 million a year ago on Fox.

Without any compelling storylines or interesting newcomers, like Bubba Wallace a year ago, the TV ratings for this Daytona 500 could hit an all-time low. The race will still go on, and millions will still watch, but more or less because it is an old tradition, emphasis on the old.