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Move over, Indy: The battle of the Dales sent word that Daytona is the country's best car raceby Ed Hinton
For a few decades now, stock car racing aficionados have sworn that the Daytona 500 is America's best motor race, period. It has remained a simple brawl among American drivers in American cars, in stark contrast to the imported personalities, high technology and blind-speed esoterica of the Indianapolis 500. This year those who favor fender banging were finally vindicated. Although the 38th running of the Daytona 500 was no more nor less a wrecking ball than usual, it seems to have replaced Indy as the nation's most reliable—and therefore most esteemed—motor sports event.
"Certainly, because of what is going on in Indy Car racing, the Daytona 500 is now the race," said Dale Jarrett after winning the 1996 edition of NASCAR's Super Bowl by .12 of a second over Dale Earnhardt. As biased as Jarrett might be, his assessment was on the mark. With the moguls of
Indy Car racing locked in a silly civil war over long-term control of big-time open-wheel racing in America, this year's Indianapolis 500 became a shell of its former self due to a boycott by top teams and star drivers.
Meanwhile, the Daytona 500 thunders on as a monolith of Americana. It has never suffered a rainout, a strike or a crippling boycott (a minor one by Chrysler held Richard Petty out in 1965, but that was before he became a household name). In fact, old-timers say that Bill France Sr., NASCAR's founder and the founding czar of the family dynasty that has kept Daytona on the straight and narrow, also controlled the Florida weather on race weekends.
Even Daytona's one long-running inequity continues uninterrupted: Earnhardt, the best stock car driver making left turns these days, has now failed to win the race in 18 tries. Since 1979 he has been a perennial contender, as well as the clear favorite heading into the 500 in each of the last seven years. He has won 28 less important races on the Daytona International Speedway, more than any other driver. In fact, Earnhardt won two races there in the week leading up to this year's main event: the 100-mile International Race of Champions and a 125-mile qualifying race for the 500. So neither the place nor the competition is the cause of his undoing. It's fate.
Daytona was the pits for pole sitter—and 18-time loser—Earnhardt.
photograph by George Tiedemann
Earnhardt has now lost three of the last four Daytona 500s by a total of .89 of a second—to Jarrett in 1993 by .16, to Sterling Marlin in '95 by .61 and to Jarrett again this year. From 1990, when he dominated the 500 for 499 miles only to cut a tire in the waning seconds, to this year, when he desperately tried to pass Jarrett in the final laps, Earnhardt has gone home to Mooresville, N.C., stunned and heartbroken.
The latest loss may have been the most frustrating for Earnhardt, who repeatedly swung his ominous black Chevrolet Monte Carlo to the inside and the outside of Jarrett's Ford Thunderbird in an attempt to take the lead. Earnhardt matched his magnificent late-race efforts of a year ago, when he futilely tried to run down Marlin's clearly superior car. Earnhardt has become somewhat resigned to his Daytona fate but is not yet rid of his disgust over coming up short in horsepower.
Earnhardt (number 3, lower right) once again found himself back in the crowd at Daytona.
photograph by
"Well, that's the Daytona 500," he said while still in his car in the garage area after the race. "Finished second again. No problem." But when he was pressed for details as he climbed out, Earnhardt snarled, "We couldn't do nothin'! The damn Fords were too strong! Could you not see that? Jarrett pulled us [Earnhardt, Ken Schrader and Mark Martin, the three drivers
in immediate pursuit at the end of the race] by himself. We couldn't draft up to him." Then Earnhardt stomped off, ordering security guards to slam a chain-link gate between him and pursuing minicams.
Before the race Earnhardt had said that he intended to "pass at the 499-mile mark rather than get passed at 499." In other words, he planned to make his move entering the third turn on the last lap. With 10 laps to go, he showed signs of following through with his Ruthian called shot. Running second, Earnhardt slipped alongside Jarrett and appeared to have the power to pass him. Then Earnhardt pulled his punch, seemingly saving it for the 499th mile. "That's exactly what I thought—Earnhardt was just testing," said two-time Winston Cup champion Ned Jarrett, who was working Sunday's race as a CBS analyst and who, incidentally, is Dale Jarrett's father. "I thought my son was a sitting duck."
"I'd rather look in my mirror and see anything but that number 3 car," said Dale Jarrett of Earnhardt's Chevy. "But what he didn't have was a Robert Yates engine. I'm no better than Dale Earnhardt. But I had a better race car than Dale Earnhardt."
The day ended early for Geoff Bodine.
photograph by Robert Rogers
That better race car was custom-built in Charlotte under the supervision of team owner and mechanical maestro Yates, who is yet another living testimony to the Daytona racing spirit. Yates's last Daytona 500 win came in 1992, with Davey Allison as his driver. But 17 months later Allison was killed in a helicopter crash on the infield of Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway. To fill Allison's spot, Yates hired Ernie Irvan, and the new duo immediately challenged Earnhardt and his car owner, Richard Childress, for the title of the best team in NASCAR. Then in August '94, Irvan crashed at Michigan International Speedway and suffered severe head and lung injuries. Doctors at first gave him a 10% chance to live. Almost miraculously, Irvan recovered, but he missed more than a year of racing. In the meantime Yates had to find another driver; he hired Jarrett. Before winning on Sunday, Jarrett had won only one other race for Yates—the Miller Genuine Draft 500 in July 1995—and had been widely criticized as an inadequate replacement for Irvan.
"There were times when I thought I was out of business," Yates said. "A couple of times I wanted to be out of business, the way things were going for us. I felt I was doing something wrong. But in this business, if you pay your dues and suck it up and keep digging, then what goes around comes around. And it's come around for us."
When Irvan returned to racing in September '95 despite some lasting impairment in his left eye, Yates expanded to a two-driver team and kept both him and Jarrett. Continuing his comeback, Irvan started the Daytona race on the front row next to pole sitter Earnhardt and even led very early in the race. He appeared to be the Yates team's best bet for a win—until the 27th of the race's 200 laps, when his chance was lost. Irvan was tucked behind Earnhardt in the draft when the primary ignition system on Earnhardt's car failed. In the moment it took Earnhardt to toggle-switch to his backup electronic system, he slowed, and Irvan, who was bumped from behind by Wally Dallenbach Jr., hit the retaining wall heading into Turn 1. Irvan was unhurt, but his car limped through the remainder of the race to a 35th-place finish.
Irvan's crash was the second of seven that brought out six caution flags for the day. The first incident, 10 laps into the race, ruined the chances of defending Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's 24-year-old prodigy. In another instance in which cars were running too close together, Gordon was bumped from behind, ran into the wall and completed just 13 laps. The Andretti family fell victim to some of the bad luck it historically encounters at Indy. John Andretti—nephew of Mario—who in 1995 switched from Indy Car racing to NASCAR, led for 23 laps and threatened to match his uncle's Daytona 500 victory of 1967. But a flawed pit stop just past the halfway point of the race (the lug nuts on his right rear wheel weren't tightened enough) necessitated a return to the pits and put Andretti a lap behind the leaders. Struggling to catch up, he crashed on Lap 129.
After his victory Jarrett was in an expansive mood. "What makes this win a little more special is knowing that so many people are coming over to NASCAR Winston Cup racing—that it's becoming their sport," he said. "Certainly the problems other sports are having are helping us become even more popular around the country. People have got to turn to something when their football team has moved or their baseball team is on strike."
Despite trouble, Rusty Wallace (2) and Rick Mast (1) were able to continue.
photograph by
Early on race day at the speedway, Richard Petty—NASCAR's alltime winningest driver, with 200 victories—sat grinning in the privacy of his luxury motor coach. He gazed out at a garage area teeming with VIP guests, many of whom pour sponsorship money into the sport (the best NASCAR teams now operate on budgets of $6 million to $7 million a year). "There are more people right out there, wandering around the garage area and the infield, than there were in the grandstands 20 years ago," Petty said. There were more than 150,000 packed into the grandstands for this year's 500. In the last four years Winston Cup season attendance has leaped from 3.7 million to 5.4 million.
Petty pondered the ongoing fight over the Indy 500. Beyond your basic struggle for wealth and power between Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George and the owners of Championship Auto Racing Teams Inc. (CART), the rift also concerns George's desire to return to simpler technology in an effort to rein in the rising costs of Indy Car racing and CART's desire to keep the cars high-tech. On May 26 the CART owners staged their own race, the U.S. 500 at Michigan International Speedway—won by Jimmy Vasser—in direct opposition to the Indy 500—won by Buddy Lazier. The Indy field was therefore gutted, and the CART season was set adrift without the anchoring Indy event.
NASCAR initiated the Brickyard 400 at Indy in August 1994 and packs the place every year. "We could carry their big race [the Indy 500 itself]," said Petty. "If we didn't have a conflicting date, they could change it to a NASCAR race, and I don't believe the American public would blink an eye. They wouldn't be upset at all. They'd probably be more enthusiastic than they are now, because it would go back to being an all-American sports spectacular."
"Oh, yes, I do agree," says Charlotte Motor Speedway president H.A. (Humpy) Wheeler, one of the savviest promoters in stock car racing. "Up there they used to call stock cars 'taxicabs.' But these taxicabs have come into their own. These cars in this race just run closer together than they do at Indy."
Indeed, it is brawl versus ballet.
"This," says Wheeler, standing in the Daytona garage, "is pro football on wheels. They're still playing soccer up at Indy."
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Dale Jarrett, running his first race with the Robert Yates Racing Team, won his second Daytona 500, holding off frustrated pole sitter Dale Earnhardt to win by a car length.
