The last lap of Sunday’s Daytona 500, the fifty-eighth running of NASCAR’s crown jewel event, was about as good as organisers could have asked or hoped for. On a picture-perfect Sunday afternoon in Florida, in front of a newly-renovated grandstand, jam-packed with more than one hundred thousand fans, Virginia’s Denny Hamlin, driving a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry, crossed the line mere inches in front of New Jersey’s Martin Truex Jr., the closest finish that the venerable race has ever seen.
Hamlin’s win came after a bold move in turn three/four and a ridiculously exciting race through the Daytona tri-oval to the chequered flag – it’s a horribly over-used cliché, but the fact was that everyone at the track, not to mention those watching on television were on their feet at the finish – which featured everything that’s great about stock car racing.
NASCAR’s governing body in Daytona Beach, couldn’t have drawn up the end result better if they’d tried. Okay, well, maybe Brian France and co. might’ve had perpetual fan favourite Dale Earnhardt Jr. narrowly beating out the driver most at the sport’s headquarters want to see competitive and winning races – one Danica Patrick – but, still, it felt like a banner day for stock car racing, capped by Toyota winning it’s first Daytona 500.
It’s not a stretch to say that, NASCAR had a perfect lead-up to race day, and was capped off perfectly on race day. Speedweeks went perfectly. Positivity abounded. After an entertaining Sprint Unlimited invite-only race last Saturday wee, through Daytona 500 pole qualifying (young gun Chase Elliott claimed top spot) and two fairly entertaining Duel at Daytona qualifying races to decide the rest of the forty-car field (one of which was won by Earnhardt Jr., and the other by defending series champion Kyle Busch) the sport approached it’s biggest day with plenty of confidence.
Then there was the finish itself, which had motorsports fans the world over talking. My Twitter timeline blew up on Monday morning, Australian time, as Hamlin barely pipped Truex Jr. at the line. The Daytona finish was bigger news than anything in the world of Formula One, V8 Supercars or MotoGP.
Jubilation on Sunday night as replays of the finish went all over the world must have turned to despair twelve or so hours later, when France and his colleagues at the NASCAR headquarters were made aware of the television ratings for the biggest race of the year. You figure a finish like the one we saw would lead to giant viewership numbers, right? Well, you’d be wrong.
Disastrously for NASCAR, it is expected that, by the time the final ratings numbers are collated, the 2016 2016 Daytona 500 was the second-lowest iteration of the race since 1978, the first year that the race, in it’s entirety, was screened live. The 6.1 overnight rating was down 16% from a year ago and a whopping 39% from 2015.
So, what happened?
Let’s start at the top: the previous 497.5 miles of racing weren’t as spectacular as the final tour of the 2.5-mile superspeedway. Plate racing, like we see at Daytona and Talladega, is much-maligned by fans, but in the recent boom days of the sport that commenced at the turn of the century and saw popularity surge for a good seven or eight years, plate races have been hard to look away from. You need only look back to, say, 2003 or 2004, and witness the white-knuckle, pass-happy races that thrilled hundreds of thousands at the sport’s biggest and fastest tracks.
You can make a case that the introduction of the new Car of the Future concept in it’s various recent iterations since 2007 has wrecked the racing. I mean, we just haven’t seen the same sort of close racing with the old cars since the new platform has begun. When I first got into the sport in 2002, the racing was hard-fought, and you barely went a few weeks without seeing some ridiculously close finish – Darlington in the spring of 2003 for example, or Atlanta two years later, when Johnson and Edwards banged doors en route to the stripe – but these days, close finishes are an exception rather than the rule. The racing, for the most part, has become bland on bland racetracks, where suspect debris cautions seem the only way to close up a pack.
A decided change from the Earnhardt’s, Allison’s, Petty’s, Yarborough’s and Wallace’s of the old NASCAR to the Johnson’s, Hamlin’s, Gordon’s and Kahne’s of the sport’s new era hasn’t sat well with old fans. They enjoyed listening to drivers tell it like it was in victory lane and elsewhere.
Now, the refreshing straight talk that you heard twenty years ago has been replaced by sponsor reference after sponsor reference. That’s definitely alienated a large, traditional fan base who grew up with drivers speaking their mind. These days, drivers are afraid to say anything even mildly controversial, lest they upset their sponsors. When did David Pearson ever really worry about that?
Rightly or wrongly, there’s a perception that the sport has sold out it’s traditional southern roots. Bastions of the sport like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro are gone, Darlington has just one race as does Atlanta, two venues that used to pack in fans, and were chock-full of memories. Moving races from those famous tracks to uninspiring 1.5-mile tri-oval venues like Kansas or Kentucky, where racing is bland and where there is no link to the old days so revered by fans.
Finally, we must look at the schedule, which features more than thirty races a year, visiting most venues twice, often to blocks of empty seats. A more compact season featuring shorter races would stop fan burnout – 300 miles is about the right distance, with some races, like the Daytona 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day remaining at their traditional distance, to elevate those events above others, something that IndyCar has done well in recent times.
NASCAR’s contrived Chase for the Championship might be the biggest reason fans are turning away from the sport in droves – followed closely by the string of championships won by the largely-unpopular Jimmie Johnson. The playoff idea with elimination races to set up a final four showdown works well for stick and ball sports, but I’ve never been a fan of it in motor racing. Nor, it seems, are large proportions of NASCAR’s fan base. Reverting to the traditional season-long points hunt will make a lot of people incredibly happy.
The Daytona 500 ratings will be a wake-up call for anyone connected to the sport who believed things were on the uptick. There’s still time – albeit a narrow window – to change certain things about the sport. Hopefully the powers-that-be can do something to arrest the sport’s popularity slide.
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