JENSEN: Be Careful What You Wish For

The top lane was the fast way around at Daytona…

Tom Jensen | Posted February 25, 2013 Daytona Beach, FL

Jeff Gordon and Danica Patrick lead the field during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 24, 2013 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo: Getty Images)

When Trevor Bayne won the 2011 Daytona 500, there were 74 lead changes among 22 drivers.

And fans hated it, just as they hated it two months later at Talladega, when Jimmie Johnson’s margin of victory over Clint Bowyer was just 0.002 seconds, the top eight cars crossed the start-finish line separated by 0.2 seconds and there were 88 lead changes.

The 2011 season was the high-water mark for the two-car tandem racing, where one driver would slam into the car ahead of it and shoot both cars forward. I called it the Beast With Two Bumpers.

But fans hated it, as witnessed by the empty seats, especially at Talladega. So, listening to its fans, NASCAR did everything it could to eliminate tandem drafting in Sprint Cup. Last year at Daytona, NASCAR monkeyed with the rules on cooling systems so severely that drivers couldn’t stay together for any length of time.

This year, NASCAR went much further. On the new Generation-6 cars, the front and rear bumpers don’t line up, making bump drafting almost impossible. And the cars have so much drag, passing was nearly impossible in this year’s Daytona 500.

The result? Instead of 74 lead changes and 22 different leaders when Bayne won the 2011 500, there were only 28 lead changes among 14 drivers this time around.

For most of this year’s Daytona 500, the cars stayed glued to the top lane because drivers couldn’t pull out and pass on the bottom. When you have 30 cars in the top lane and four cars in the bottom lane, the top lane is going to be faster every time.

Hell, when Johnson was on the bottom lane it took him forever to pass leader Brad Keselowski, who had a badly damaged nose on his Penske Racing Ford.

“I was desperately wanting to get by him or in the inside lane,” Johnson said. “There were far more cars lined up on the outside lane than the inside. … It was just so hard to make up time on the bottom because there were fewer cars.”

Keselowski said no one tried to pass on the bottom lane because they knew it was futile.

“The high lane just had all the speed,” said the defending NASCAR Sprint Cup champion. “It doesn’t mean we weren’t trying. It just wouldn’t go down there on the bottom and it made it real hard to pass. It wasn’t for lack of effort. I would rather make that effort, and I did, but I kept going to the back. The only thing worse than not being able to make a pass, is being in the back. That is just the way it was today.”

Restrictor-plate races are known for last-lap passes. There were none in the four Cup races at Daytona Speedweeks this year — the Daytona 500, the Sprint Unlimited or the two Gatorade Duel races. Not a thrilling finish in any of them.

I don’t pretend to have an answer on how to fix this. And it certainly wasn’t the fault of the G-6 cars.

The irony in all this, of course, is that before the horrible last-lap crash, fans were raving about how great Saturday’s NASCAR Nationwide race was — and it was tandem drafting all day long, because the Nationwide cars have a much different rules package than the Cup cars do.

The one comfort in all this? In the final 10 laps of the Daytona 500, the race came down to two champions duking it out for the win. The cream always seems to rise to the top, no matter what the rules package.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Jensen

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