Happy Hour Mailbag: Close finishes, winnings, blocking and more
Welcome to the first 2016 edition of Happy Hour Mailbag. As always, tweet us your thoughts or shoot us an email at [email protected] if you want to participate.
Let’s start with this. Sunday’s race was not an A+ race. It was a race that was average, at best, for the first 199 laps. Before Denny Hamlin’s pass for the lead there were three green-flag lead changes that didn’t happen because of pit stops. Three. Hamlin made it four.
The last half-lap was an A+ for sure. It was one of the best Daytona 500 finishes ever. But a finish does not make a race, just like a great race isn’t automatically an average one if the leader runs away with the win over the last 15 laps and wins by two seconds. It’s important to remember the entirety of the race even though we’re always going to have great memories of the move Hamlin pulled over Daytona’s final mile.
While NASCAR had said that purse money would no longer be a part of race box scores because of the structure of the new charter agreement, the official results of the Daytona 500 have race winnings listed … and it was incorrect.
Hamlin’s winnings were shown slightly lower than $80,000 less than Joey Logano’s ($1,586,503) in 2015. Not that big of a disparity from 2015, right? Well, NASCAR told teams Thursday that it screwed up and incorrectly listed race winnings on its site. We’ll let you know when or if we find out what the winnings for the Daytona 500 were.
Time for questions.
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I question if this was the closest finish ever. In 1958 My Uncle, Willard Jenkins worked the PURE Oil gas pumps. We talked to the start finish line for the last few laps and both of us wanted Beauchamp to win. Drove back to Charlotte Happy. Willard to his death and me to this day do not believe Petty won. The fix was in. No Texas boy could come down south and win that race. NASCAR wouldn’t allow it. – Charles
This finish came in at No. 5 in our top Daytona 500 finishes. It may be higher if there was elecronic timing or video of the race. While we’re not disputing the closeness of the finish, we do wonder if it was closer than the finish on Sunday. From our vantagepoint in the press box we had no idea who won. The 10 seconds of panic trying to figure out who won the race before rationality kicked in is unforgettable.
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What is with NASCAR having a 40-car field?? – John
There were 39 cars on the entry list for Atlanta. Does it matter if the field was 40 or 43 cars at that point? The concerns over a 40-car field are overblown, especially in the short term if fields will continue to be short of 40 cars.
Thanks for reading all of our Daytona 500 stuff and hopefully you’ve gone out and bought a copy of Jay Busbee’s Earnhardt Nation. No, he didn’t pay me anything for the plug. He didn’t even buy me a beer.
The list of NASCAR behavioral penalties is eerily close to a preschool rules list with a racing twist. We kid, sort of, when we say that, but we give NASCAR credit for making the rules public and doing away with secrecy (we think). It was just a bit odd that NASCAR announced the guidelines at 7 p.m. on the Friday before the Daytona 500. In 2015, Kurt Busch was suspended at about that time. Perhaps our PTSD from that announcement kicked in.
And no Cadbury eggs yet. Gotta wait for the sales. We’re staying vigilant and aiming for a 9-month supply in the weeks after Easter.
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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!
