The main event: Nothing comes close to the Daytona 500
By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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Mark Sluder / Mark Sluder - NASCAR Scene
The splendor and pageantry of today's Daytona 500 is far removed from what fans experienced at the first Daytona 500 in 1959.
Fifty weeks of the year, Ron Marcano is a carpenter in Richmond, Va. But for 14 days every February, he becomes a full-time race fan in Daytona Beach, Fla.
Marcano and about 199,999 other fans call Daytona Beach home for a mid-February fortnight when NASCAR thunder splits the calm of winter, ending more than two months of purgatory.
“It’s like being let out of jail,” says Marcano, who emphasizes that he has never spent any time in the hoosegow. “I don’t go on vacation in the summer. If you’re a real NASCAR fan, you’re going to be in Daytona in February.”
Speedweeks are filled with sports car races, preliminary events and qualifying, but the pot of gold at the end of the February rainbow is, of course, the Daytona 500.
And, come Feb. 18, 2008, when Daytona falls quiet again, the NASCAR Nation will turn their eyes to February 2009, already looking forward to the biggest race in America.
That’s how it has been for 50 years. There is the Daytona 500, and then there is Everything Else. Periodically, a debate erupts about which is more important: a Daytona 500 win or a Cup championship. The very question says it all about the race’s primacy. The race also carries a big paycheck — by far the biggest of the year. Even a last-place finish pays enough to cover a college education. Kevin Harvick collected $1.5 million for winning in 2007, while Tony Stewart’s 43rd-place run was worth $334,000.
The Daytona 500, though, is about more than money, trophies, racing and NASCAR. It has become a cultural touchstone — a
definitive event that, for the uninitiated, “explains” NASCAR and shows what stock car racing is all about. Even devotees of so-called “stick-and-ball” sports who cast a wary eye toward motorsports know about Daytona and its place in America’s great sports montage.
The race attracts coverage from news outlets that otherwise give very little notice to NASCAR. Business barons, A-listers and megastars from other sports also flock to the race (please see sidebar on page 66). Many of them even find themselves unexpectedly hooked on racing after they feel the roar of the engines and experience the Daytona spectacle.
For racers — even those bouncing around a rutted dirt quarter-mile on the outskirts of Podunk — Daytona is a beacon shining in the distance.
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“It was like another universe,” says two-time Daytona 500 winner Bill Elliott, who began his racing career on Georgia short tracks. “You had heard about it, but, as far as wanting to be there one day, it was so far out of reach. It was like another planet. You might as well be going to Venus or Pluto.”
The 500 was born in 1959, but it didn’t enter the world quietly. Bill France Sr. conjured his leviathan from the muck and mire of a swamp west of Daytona Beach. The massive facility served as a replacement for the old beach/road course and as a bull-in-a-china-shop example of the fearsome capability of the still-developing stock-car racing circuit.
France wanted something as big and bold as the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway — only faster. He got it with banking that reached to the skies and with a nasty, dangerous race course that was unlike anything the traveling daredevils who raced for him had ever seen.
France and his fellow NASCAR pioneers made Daytona International Speedway a place of magic and tragedy, of glory and struggle.
Even before the 2.5-mile track hosted its first race, it earned a place in the dark corners of racing history. While testing an Indy car on Feb. 11, 1959, the course’s asphalt still fresh, driver Marshall Teague wrecked violently in the second turn. Teague, whose driver’s seat was torn from the car as it rolled, died instantly.
Undaunted, they ran the inaugural Daytona 500 just 11 days later. More than 40,000 spectators showed up, and France, who had struggled for years to build the speedway and placed himself in perilous debt along the way, realized a handsome race-day profit of $500,000.
What would later become the most important stock car race in the country had begun in fine style — even if, or perhaps because, it ended strangely. The finish of that first 500 was one of the best in what has become a half-century of racing at Daytona. So close was the finish that France and his lieutenants needed three days to declare a winner. The unusual circumstances earned the race more than its share of national publicity. For France, the attention was even more valuable than the stacks of cash he counted in his living room after the race.
The 1959 Daytona 500 quickly secured its place in racing lore, and the track’s legend grew as men like Junior Johnson, Fireball Roberts, Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough mastered the high banks and proved that racers could go ever faster.
From the beginning, Daytona became the place for racers to be, and the Daytona 500 became the race they most wanted to win. It didn’t hurt that France shrewdly scheduled his prized race during the middle of what, in most of the country, was a long, hard winter. For those seeking escape, Daytona Beach, the Atlantic and the promise of bumper-to-bumper racing were like candy to kindergarteners.
Although Darlington Raceway, NASCAR’s first big asphalt track, had been open for almost a decade and other tracks were building reputations in NASCAR’s formative years, Daytona became synonymous with stock-car racing.
The race even attracted world-class racers like Mario Andretti, who would win the 1978 Formula One world championship and the 1969 Indianapolis 500. Andretti, like many others, understood the appeal of one of the world’s greatest race courses. He came to Daytona in 1967 and won the 500.
“Daytona is the one because it has the rich tradition,” Andretti says. “It’s the one you identify with. When you think Daytona, you think stock cars right away. This is one of the classics anywhere in the world.”
France tirelessly pumped the publicity machine for Daytona. He lived down the street, of course, and NASCAR was headquartered in Daytona Beach, so it was natural that the track would become the centerpiece of his developing enterprise and the 500 the keystone of his racing series.
“Compared to other race tracks at that time, Daytona was awesome — with its spectacular high banks, high speeds and unknowns,” says retired driver Darrell Waltrip. “Nobody knew much about aerodynamics. Nobody knew much about anything that happened. Guys were going out over the wall. Guys were going across the finish line three-abreast. This is the original place where our sport really developed the kind of competition we have today because things went on at Daytona that even the drivers didn’t understand.”
Daytona required even the smartest and bravest drivers to look twice and swallow hard when they saw the massive track for the first time.
Their stories — repeated for rapt friends and fellow racers back home — fed the Daytona mystique.
“It was intimidating, but I couldn’t wait to get out there,” says Geoffrey Bodine, who ran his first 500 in 1979 and won in ’86. “I knew right then that this was what racing was all about. I had come from half-miles and third-miles and quarter-miles. To come to a track this size was pretty impressive. I thought some of the half-mile tracks were huge. You go back to them now and they look like postage stamps.”
Derrike Cope, the surprise winner of the 1990 Daytona 500, says DIS wouldn’t be what it is without a dreamer like France.
“It always comes down to visionaries in almost everything,” he says. “He was one of those guys who had the sense of magnitude. You look at the severity of the banking and the fact that you were going to have cars running over 200 miles per hour. Nobody ever thought you could put those cars on a place like this.”
But running at Daytona is a singular sensation — one that leaves even the most seasoned racing veterans changed forever.
“When you come here to race for the first time, you come out of the tunnel, look down in Turn 1 and say, ‘Oh my God. What am I doing here?’ ” Buddy Baker, winner of the 1980 Daytona 500, says. “You could put five race tracks together and not make this place. I hadn’t ever been on anything even close. Somebody said, ‘Well, you have to run wide open all the way around.’ The first time I went through the corner wide open, I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’ But it’s kind of like soloing in an airplane for the first time. You don’t go back to the ground. You’re already committed.”
That daring, that drama, that wonder about which driver could go the fastest through the turns and emerge on the other side of the track in one piece and as the best of the bunch built Daytona’s reputation.
Soon, for the 50th time, the roar of the 500 will be heard again. The echoes are from Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp in the first year, the year that Bill France created a cultural phenomenon.
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Bill Elliott
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