A lesson from this weekend? It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. A demonstration of that is the couple of people telling TC he’s full of it for writing that all those deals for Daytona would fall apart (thank you for pointing out the obvious). Turns out they didn’t. In a couple of instances (like AJ Allmendinger and Marcos Ambrose), two guys stuck together through thick and thin at the detriment of one or both teams.
Through 170 laps we had guys working different strategies with a singular hope – that they would be in a position to be lucky at the end. It was, in a word, chaos. At the heart of everything was the tandem drafting that dominated from the drop of the green flag and has become the new norm at superspeedways. When all was said and done, there were 57 lead changes among 25 drivers. Compare that to just 23 lead changes before tandem drafting at the same event in 2009.
In the after math of Saturday, some have taken to their respective perches to decry this new style of racing as boring and not racing at all. It’s fast paced, high energy and always edge of your seat. But it’s made the races almost inconsequential as teams jockey just to be decently positioned when the race comes to an end. To some extent it’s more about luck now than it is about quality of equipment or even skill. See example of this type of racing below.
Then there is the old pack style of drafting where you had 20 or 30 cars literally within inches of each other doing 200+ mph. There was no getting away from the packs and when you had the big one, you had the big one. Still, drivers weren’t dependent on just one other car to make things go. And everybody worked with everybody. It often though led to follow the leader style races through the middle portions and made for racing that was less than exciting. See example below.
I think either way you slice it, there were people for and against both styles of racing. Which is the best way? I’m not sure I’ve got an answer, but I’ll bet you do. Which style do you prefer? Sound off on Daytona.
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