I don’t know how to describe how immensely excited I am for Daytona every year. This race is a tradition, one that absolutely rocks the house and provides for not just a race of a lifetime but a memory for every watcher. For the avid racing fan, the Daytona 500 serves as a flashbulb moment for every fan to get back to the starting blocks, and all start on the right foot. It’s the one race that most everyone is watching together, so between new fans and old, everyone is watching the same screen, the same cars. Fuck FOMO. It’s a combination of beauty, beer, and the bygone.




Hopefully it provides the same show this year, but first we must address what went on in Daytona last week. Jesus christ.

What Happened Last Week?

The 2019 Advance(d) Auto Parts Clash was genuinely one of the worst races in recent memory, arguably the worst of the entire Gen 6 era. All of the stars were there: Rain delays, boredom, sweater weather, February 2000 revival restrictor plate racing, millions of dollars burned, zero hype produced for the Daytona 500, 3 undamaged cars, and 20 missing laps from the end due to mother nature. It was a bonafide mess unfortunately, but hey we can always look forward to laughing about how absolutely terrible this race was in 10 years. That’ll be pretty nice.


In that spirit, I have rewatched the FS1 telecast along with a few shitty twitch stream replays, and have ranked every lap by how entertaining it was.

1. Lap 32: Jimmie Johnson makes it three wide into turn one and with it comes the pack! 3 wide racing all the way around while Paul Menard still slays anyone trying to come up to his reign


2. Lap 1: Kyle Busch leads the pack to the green and leads the first lap! The pack is side-by-side and there’s 3 wide in the back! My life is perfect, I drink my beverage of choice and sing incantations built by the men that built my sport. For once in my life, I feel like I love my country as much as I love those in my life. I go on Amazon, bust a union, and buy a thin blue stripe flag for my car and place it in the passenger window so everyone who enters my car will understand that these colors don’t run: They drive, directly into battle. I enlist in the military and buy stocks in Raytheon.

3. Lap 34: Alex Bowman tries to go three-wide with Kyle Larson and it works, but it doesn’t change the fact that the top-side compatriot in this 3-wide kerfuffle are *checks notes* 3 Fords, 2 Chevys, and 2 Toyotas all going about 10 mph faster and in a 17-car procession. Larson squeezes into the top lane at turn 3 and this move will ultimately result in him being involved in the lap 56 crash.


4. Lap 50

5. Lap 24: This happens


6. Lap 2: Paul Menard takes the lead on the backstretch on lap 2 from Kyle Busch. Brad Keselowski takes a peek to the outside and falls back in line. This will pretty much set up the entire race, so try not to think about that okay moving on

7. Lap 54

8. Lap 12: Alex Bowman doesn’t get a good start and Martin Truex Jr. gives him a bump draft on the back straight and damn we got some 2 wide action y’all!


9. Lap 49

10. Lap 13: Alex Bowman and Martin Truex Jr. get fucking steamrolled! Truex gets passed by exactly half the field in 40 seconds


11. Lap 53: Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, and Kevin Harvick decide to pass Jamie McMurray and it works because Jamie McMurray is a worthless driver who sustained a very long career on the back of being very mediocre and being the only driver on the grid without a southern accent. Sponsors love him.

12. Lap 55

13. Lap 33: The outside lane is pretty strong

14. Lap 35: I wonder if that’ll be a trend today

15. Lap 8 (Yellow): Oh No! The pack almost crashes from the rain! Let’s hope that doesn’t happen today!


16. Lap 9 (Red): Red flag shenanigans so sure why not

17. Lap 28 (Yellow): We got pit stops! Paul Menard takes the lead back! What action!


18. Lap 3: for dale

19. Lap 7

20. Lap 51

21. Lap 48: This is a restart!

22. Lap 10 (Yellow): Pit stops! Jamie McMurray gets a good stop and does well, but this will ultimately result in him being involved in the lap 56 crash.


23. Lap 5: yep


24. Lap 39: Daniel Suarez passes Martin Truex Jr and quickly gets back in line. Please make your funny ironic jokes about how Daniel Suarez is better than MTJ in the comments below

25. Lap 43 (Red): Red Flag Shenanigans!

26. Lap 19: The Fords have a pretty nice ass and it’s pretty awesome to look at 5 of their asses at a time in one shot


27. Lap 29 (Yellow): grabbed a coke

28. Lap 36

29. Lap 16: Kurt and Kyle Busch get pretty close to bump drafting on the backstretch which is pretty cool, but this will ultimately result in them being involved in the lap 56 crash.


30. Lap 31 (Yellow): Pace car lights out!

31. Lap 11 (Yellow): Pace car lights out

32. Lap 47 (Yellow): Lack of lights on the pace car is notable. It means we have a restart soon.


33. Lap 17

34. Lap 52

35. Lap 26 (Yellow): I swear to god they played the practice crash at least five times during the race like it was in any way remarkable.


36. Lap 4: “Whole field is single file at the wall.”-Kevin Hamlin reports over radio. Kevin, you don’t know what you’re in for.

37. Lap 30 (Yellow)

38. Lap 14: Denny Hamlin kinda takes a low-ish turn around the trioval which is pretty neat


39. Lap 44 (Yellow)

40. Lap 37: About right here I looked outside and saw a blanket of snow on my car. This snow persisted until directly after the race.


41. Lap 41 (Yellow)

42. Lap 21: This has nothing to do with the race but I think this may be genuinely one of my favorite tweets of all time so I wanted to share it with y’all


43. Lap 38

44. Lap 57 (Yellow): disbelief

45. Lap 58 (Yellow): laughter

46. Lap 59 (Yellow): end of race

47. Lap 6: and we’re already talking about hockey in the gc

48. Lap 18

49. Lap 42 (Yellow): absolutely

50. Lap 23






51. Lap 27 (Yellow): The competition caution lasted for more than 13 minutes. How does it take you a full mealtime video to do a caution oh my lord.


52. Lap 22: i miss ricky stenhouse jr

53. Lap 46 (Yellow)

54. Lap 40 (Yellow): It’s raining!

55. Lap 45 (Yellow)

56. Lap 25 (Yellow)

57. Lap 15: FOX runs full screen replays of cars merging into lanes

58. Lap 20: Remember, kids: NASCAR is the fucked up one for throwing cautions to bunch up the field until you want a caution and then it’s magically okay and they’re doing it wrong for not throwing the flag


59-74. Laps 60-75 (Yellow): Race declared and Jimmie Johnson burned a million dollars in front of every team for fun and then celebrated with his team.

75. Lap 56: death of sun

Yeah in review fuck this race Re-watchability Index: 10%

How Your Race Day Will Go

Sit next to the parents you love and talk their ever-loving ear off about some sport they hate. It’s their fault, too.


The second they handed you the TiVo remote and left the room, you were left to the drug of cable television without a kids-lock, and you were able to watch it all. You were the first family on the block with TiVo anyways, and your parents bought it with the sole intention to make sure you could watch TV without the dangers of commercials, the desecration of a young mind through the perils of consumerism. And it worked for a time (Attempts to reenact the Spongebob laugh became a mainstay of your childhood). However after a time, things changed. The second Mom and Dad left was, as all things American, the time to do exactly what your authority figure said not to do.

And so you would fast forward directly past the shows to the commercials, and fell in love with advertising, with the brands. McDonald’s replaced Sesame Street. Coca-Cola replaced Between the Lions. Anthony Sullivan replaced Timmy Turner and Billy Mays replaced Jimmy Neutron. You fell in love with the commercials and the personalities behind them. One day you were flipping channels trying to fill your head with some more, and you find The SPEED channel. Oh my god did SPEED Channel become your favorite channel on television, and almost parallel to that became your affixation with NASCAR. It was a clash of everything you’d recently come to love: Advertising and explosions, I guess. To a future marketer, this was your dream and your new favorite thing on Earth, not that your parents would ever know. You run into their room and yell at them about this crazy sport you discovered and now love so much. Under the grey, maize, and blue skies of the hippie-paradise of Ann Arbor, they grimace then, they grimace now, and they grimace forever. It’s something that they don’t like, something they don’t want to understand what (or who) it represents. But god damn it, they love you, and they’ll support you through anything. So they take you to every race in the state of Michigan, and start rooting for drivers (your dad for Jamie McMurray and your mom for Ryan Newman). They buy the merch, interact with fans, and one day you find them watching races on their own. And they’ll throw a little thing for Daytona for you. Because it’s the Great American Race.


You wake up at 6 AM for Daytona and rush into the living room, wearing your homemade t-shirt with a crudely drawn #20 written in a now-bloody orange on the front. The smell of bacon livens the mood, and even though it’s cold as only a polar vortex can offer, your dad makes sure to bring in all of the grill hits. He invites family and your hippie friends and their hippie neighbors and this whole hippie town, and makes sure they all pick a driver, and makes sure they enjoy something that you’ll love forever. Your family brings out the Coca-Cola, the McDonald’s, the Mountain Dew. They take a day to halt a childhood built by visits to Whole Foods and farmers markets to just let you be the soul of soulless, an American kid. A greased up, PR-friendly, 3,000 calorie-humming-the-FreeCreditReport.com-song-kid. The gradual decay of hundreds of hindrances and the half-life of the shelf-life of your life forlong you in the smallest way. When you see a driver you hate crash, you cheer. No lives were impacted because it’s NASCAR and nothing can ever go wrong with it.

Maybe this is just a phase, and in 6 months you’ll be watching hockey like a good Michigander would. Or maybe this is more, and the actions of your parents, their efforts for a few short months at year 5, will blossom you into a fervor of adoration for years to come. And maybe this will become something to bring you out of it. Something to strive for when there isn’t anything to be happy about. (And don’t worry, you won’t be happy a lot).


No spoilers, but you can guess what’ll happen.

What Will Happen on Track?

Whatever happened last week, hopefully not that. But in reality, unless there’s rain we’ll be in for a pretty alright show. The Clash was more of a glorified practice session than ever this year, so it’s going to be a whole lot of nothing until specifically lap 147 and then the world will go insane and we’ll have some nostalgic racing. I picked Kevin Harvick last week and was way wrong, but this week I will say Kevin Harvick again because I don’t know how to admit being wrong.


Should I Watch This Race?

You will watch this race.

Notes