THE 2000 DAYTONA 500: A SURE CURE FOR INSOMNIA

I’m not sure where to begin with today’s race. It was
pretty much as Dale Earnhardt predicted last week with everyone staying in line
and no passing. Except for Jarrett’s ______ (fill in the blank with your own
adjective) move at the last on Johnny Benson, there was no real action.

Why was there no passing? Beats me. But if this is a taste
of things to come for the rest of the season, NASCAR’s premier division has
taken a giant step backwards.

Without getting too much into the Chevy/Ford aerodynamic
deal, you had to be blind to not see that the Ford body shape for 2000 was
better than the Chevrolet body shape…at least at Daytona (next week could be a
different story). Chevrolet’s did do some passing, but the high-dollar Ford
teams led by Yates and Roush pretty much stunk up the show. I don’t think the
Chevrolet made a competitive pass for the lead all day.

It’s pretty obvious that NASCAR went a little overboard
with the shock deal. I think everybody agrees that the teams were doing too much
trick stuff during qualifying and that NASCAR needed to do something. When
NASCAR announced that they’d be issuing the shocks for qualifying, it looked
like they were going in the right direction. But I’m not sure anyone realized
that they were also going to issue shocks for the race as well.

I’m sure that NASCAR will make a change by April for the
Talladega race. They’re an entertainment company first, and a sports sanctioning
body second. If they don’t provide an entertaining product, then TV remotes
start clicking over to more exciting events like the America’s Cup races or
Charlie Brown on Ice.