Quick takeaways from the Daytona 500
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Throughout 2016 we may have way too many quick thoughts for our post-race posts. So consider our new Takeaways feature to be the home of our random and sometimes intelligent musings. Sometimes the post may have a theme. Sometimes it may just be a mess of unrelated thoughts. Make sure you tweet us your thoughts after the race or email your post-race rants via the link in the signature line below.
• We’re all going to be buzzing from that finish for a while, don’t you think? Not only did Denny Hamlin’s move on the final lap create one of the most dramatic finishes in the last 10 years of NASCAR but he rendered all Toyota-team complaints irrelevant.
Had Hamlin stayed in line for the final lap along with Matt Kenseth, Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards, there would have been much griping about how the Toyota teams weren’t aggressive and kept the best for the team ahead of the best for the individual. NASCAR fans aren’t big fans of teamwork, especially when it comes to big events.
• Any teamwork complaints would have also overshadowed Toyota’s dominance. The four Joe Gibbs Racing cars (and the technically-aligned car of Truex) were up front for a reason. They were the race’s fastest. While Edwards was involved in two incidents, the other four were up front for most of the race and led a combined 156 of the race’s 200 laps.
The speed the cars showed wasn’t a fluke either. JGR was the fastest team throughout Speedweeks and the depth was further evidenced by Kenseth and Truex succeeding in backup cars after their primaries were destroyed in Thursday’s qualifying races.
• Hamlin became the first driver since Dale Jarrett in 2000 to win the Sprint Unlimited and the Daytona 500 in the same season. The feat has been accomplished by five different drivers and Jarrett is the only one to do it twice.
• Before Hamlin made his race-winning pass on the final lap, the race featured three passes for the lead (Dale Earnhardt Jr. over Chase Elliott, Kyle Busch over Junior and Busch over Jimmie Johnson) that didn’t happen as a product of pit stops. Given that evidence we’re not sure if our question after Thursday night’s Duels was answered.
We asked after the qualifying races if the difficulty shown so far throughout Speedweeks in passing the car at the front of the pack was because of the lead car’s excellence or the aerodynamics involved in the current restrictor plate setup. Our guess then was it was a mixture of both, and given how good the Gibbs cars were on Sunday, we’re going to stick with it.
• Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team struggled to keep up with the handing of the track and the indelible memory of his Daytona 500 will be his lap 171 crash. But while Junior ultimately finished 36th, he looked like he was going to be the driver to take on the JGR cars in the moments before his crash.
On the laps before the wreck following the final round of green-flag pit stops, Junior was picking off cars one-by-one like a restrictor plate race from 10 years ago. He passed Joey Logano with ease on the outside (and minimal help) and looked set to do so on Austin Dillon before his car went spinning off turn 4.
The crash also likely means the end for Amelia, the car Earnhardt drove to a 1.75 average finish in restrictor plate races in 2015 and that he drove on Sunday.
“I just got loose,” Junior said of the crash. “I’ve been really working on the balance of the car. I’ve been pushing real bad all day, especially off of Turn 4. We just got it really free. We took two tires there and just didn’t have overall grip I was hoping for. I was aggressive trying to side draft guys and move forward. We were making some ground on the leaders a little bit so that was looking pretty good because the outside line really hadn’t been doing anything all day.
“Just busted my butt there. Driver mistake.”
• Junior led 15 laps. Teammate Jimmie Johnson led 18 laps. Chase Elliott led 3. That’s a total of 36 laps led by Hendrick Motorsports, second to Joe Gibbs Racing. And if you’re good at math, that means seven cars from two teams led a total of 192 laps.
• The Daytona 500 is always good for a top 10 finisher for a team who won’t regularly be contending for it. The 2016 honor goes to Regan Smith, who finished eighth. Depending on other restrictor plate races, it could be the only top-10 finish Smith has all season.
• While BK Racing got all four of its cars into the Daytona 500, it wasn’t a productive Sunday. Matt DiBenedetto was in a hard crash and Robert Richardson scrubbed the wall and had mechanical issues. David Ragan was the team’s highest-finishing car in 29th and Michael Waltrip finished 30th.
• Can’t blame Greg Biffle too much for his incident with Danica Patrick on lap 185. Patrick went sliding into the backstretch grass off Biffle’s bumper and Biffle, who was trying to pass Patrick, subsequently hit the wall.
The crash happened because Patrick blocked Biffle past the yellow line on the track. Should she have been blocking? Well, with 15 laps to go, we can’t necessarily blame her. And while blocking has become a necessary evil in the Cup Series, drivers are learning that there is a massive downside too. Patrick experienced that downside.
– – – – – – –
Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
