Holding A Pretty Wheel: Has the Daytona 500 Become a Bad Rerun?

Sunday’s (Feb. 16) Daytona 500 certainly had its moments.

William Byron took the white flag in ninth place and came home with his second Harley J. Earl trophy in a row, the first driver to go back-to-back since Denny Hamlin did it in 2019 and 2020. Before that, you have to go back to Sterling Marlin in 1994-95. That’s a pretty big deal for Byron, who may be Hendrick Motorsports’ most consistent driver, though he’s often overshadowed by his teammates.

Then there was Jimmie Johnson. The once-dominant Johnson wove and danced his way through a last-lap pileup to finish third. Johnson has struggled hard in limited starts in the Next Gen car. He turns 50 this year and it feels like Johnson’s days in the car, even on a part-time basis, are drawing to a close.

Sunday’s finish was vintage Johnson, the kind where he came seemingly out of nowhere to steal a great finish. It allows him to be remembered as the driver he was and not the one who tried so hard recently only to look like time passed him by. He knew it, too, the smile on his face afterward was more that of a kid with his first taste of success than one of the most successful drivers ever, but the tears in his eyes suggested he knew exactly what it meant.

Universally popular Helio Castroneves ran an impressive race for a driver who had never driven a NASCAR Cup Series car anywhere, let alone in the Daytona International Speedway hornets’ nest. His night ended early but through no fault of his own. That Castroneves, a four-time Indianapolis 500 winner with nothing to prove, wanted to race in NASCAR speaks volumes.

The race featured some breathtaking moments. Spectacular saves by both veteran Hamlin and rookie Riley Herbst will make the highlight reels. So too will Ryan Preece’s airborne rollover, albeit for a different reason.

All of these moments were memorable, woven into the fabric of the Great American Race alongside all the others: The Fight in 1979, Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt winning after so many tries, all the triumphs and heartaches and human moments along the way.

So why was Sunday’s race so forgettable?

The truth is, racing at superspeedways, and Daytona in particular has become formulaic and predictable: drivers conserve fuel for about three-quarters of the race, resulting in little action as they try to avoid trouble and minimize pit stops. 

Once they get to the point where fuel isn’t an issue, with the laps rapidly winding down, they turn the race into a three-wide mob of cars that can’t get away from themselves and don’t have the room to avoid trouble even if they had the throttle response for it. There’s a big, multi-car crash that’s become so commonplace that The Big One is spoken of as an inevitability, a “when” and not an “if.”

Cautions breed cautions, so there’s another one with five or six laps to go, and then an overtime finish that features another pileup coming to the line. 

Sunday’s Daytona 500 was the first one in three years to not end under caution. Six of the last eight have required at least one overtime restart to settle them. The drivers who take the white flag rarely all make it to the checkered.

It’s the same race every time.

The formula also holds in the 400-mile summer race, with that one often featuring even more chaos as it’s the cutoff race for the playoffs these days.

Superspeedway racing is a skillset in its own right, but it has become so much of a race for survival that skill has become secondary to blind luck. Racing is about being in the best position to capitalize on the opportunity for a win, but all the strategy and skill in the world don’t matter when a driver is in the middle of 30 cars racing three wide and nose to tail. The only real way to avoid trouble is to be in front of it or far enough behind to weave through or simply get lucky.

It’s easy to say that Daytona is unpredictable. After all, The Big One could happen at any time and to anybody. The race to the checkers is always a melee and often the winner is decided in the final seconds.

All of that is true, but it fits the formula of log laps, go, crash, go again, crash again, crash again, overtime, maybe another overtime, crash coming to the checkers. 

It’s gotten to the point where very few superspeedway races, and those at Daytona in particular, are memorable for the racing alone.

The moments are still there. Five years from now, people will remember Preece’s flip and emotional response that all he could think about was his toddler daughter. They’ll remember what may well be Johnson’s last stand and Castroneves’ NASCAR debut long after the checkered flag.

But will anything of the majority of the race, even the great saves or Byron racing Tyler Reddick to the line or who, exactly, was involved in The Big Ones and what touched them off, end up in the collective memory?

Will fans talk about the 2025 Daytona 500, or any recent editions, centered on the races themselves five years down the line? Will they talk of each race’s highs and lows, of how the races were won and lost, and how teams strategized their way to the win?

I’ll be the first to argue that the moments matter, and they matter a lot. They’re part of the very fabric the sport is woven on. Even if every race was memorable and exciting on its own merits, the people tell the story.

But without the races, they don’t have a story to tell. If the people and the moments are the warp in NASCAR’s fabric, they can’t stand up without the woof that is the racing itself. If one isn’t there, the other is weak and muted.

That’s the last thing that should happen to NASCAR’s most prestigious race. But without changes somewhere, it’s in danger of becoming homogenized into a string of races that don’t look any different from each other. Pretty soon, the stories will get lost in the shuffle among races that play out in the same way, time after time.

Races should be unpredictable. The Daytona 500 has become predictable even in its unpredictability. It shouldn’t just end up wash, rinse, repeat. 

Amy Henderson

Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.