It took NASCAR three days to decide the winner of the first Daytona 500. It took NASCAR five seconds to decide the winner of the 49th. History may see little difference in the controversies.
If Sunday’s wildest running of NASCAR’s showcase race could be summarized in a single sentence, winner Kevin Harvick said it all in a trembling breath: “This is what makes stock car racing what it is.”
Good and bad.
Glorious and notorious.
Wild, close, fraught with wrecking–finished off with judgment calls by officials that leave controversies open-ended, never to be fully answered.
For the final five seconds, the outcome hung in the balance, and not just with Harvick and long-suffering sentimental favorite Mark Martin racing side by side to the checkered flag.
The outcome also hung in the officials’ tower, with a split-second decision at hand: when to throw the caution flag with cars wrecking every which way just behind Harvick and Martin.
By current NASCAR rules, a caution instantly freezes the field.
At the moment the wreck broke out, and for a moment or two afterward, Martin was ahead. But no caution came out. The field wasn’t frozen, so the driver most respected by his peers fell to 0-for-23 in Daytona 500 starts.
As the two Chevrolets crossed the finish line with Harvick’s ahead by a hood, the safety lights finally turned yellow. Freezing the field didn’t matter then. The race was over.
“They waited! They waited! I can’t believe they waited!” Martin yelled to his crew via radio. “I really thought that thing was ours, guys. It still might be.”
But after several minutes to consider, Martin knew there was no use arguing. NASCAR decisions stand.
So he resigned himself.
“Nobody wants to hear a grown man cry,” said the 48-year-old who almost retired after last season but decided to take a part-time ride with Ginn Racing this season. “This is what it is. And that’s it. That’s the end. Their decision.”
Harvick, even as he took the checkered flag, “knew I was going to be the bad guy,” he said.
All that was clear about Sunday’s race was that Harvick had made it to the line ahead. Even beyond the timing of the last caution, much else about the race was open to argument.
It was the closest 500 finish, .02 of a second margin, since the advent of electronic scoring to NASCAR in 1993. But history cannot know whether it was the closest 500 ever, because there was no definitive photo of Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp crossing the line in ’59. That’s why it took three days for NASCAR to view various photos from different angles and declare Petty the winner.
Was this the wildest? Probably.
“I’ve seen a lot of these Daytona 500s, and this has to be the wildest Daytona 500 I’ve ever watched,” said Harvick’s team owner, Richard Childress, who drove here in the 1970s before fielding cars for the late Dale Earnhardt and his many heartbreaks and one Daytona 500 win, in 1998.
What had been a yawner for the first 150 laps exploded into non-stop wild driving and major wrecking for the final 50.
The bedlam was detonated with 48 laps left. Favored Tony Stewart, in his clearly dominant Chevy, had worked his way back to second place after being sent back to 40th as a penalty for speeding off the pit road.
Stewart worked his way back to second and moved ahead of Kurt Busch for the lead when Busch nicked Stewart’s left rear bumper, sending them both crashing out of the race. With the two best cars in the race out, it was almost anybody’s contest.
And the rest of the field behaved that way. All the fury of restrictor-plate racing broke out: not just the Big One, as drivers call the nearly inevitable multicar pileup in a plate race, but the Big Four–five cars on Lap 174, five on Lap 189, three on Lap 197 and seven on Lap 202.
Yes, 202. The race had been thrown into “green-white-checkered” overtime by the wreck on 197, and even then the wrecking didn’t stop.
After the checkered, Clint Bowyer’s car tumbled upside down and afire across the finish line.
A moment earlier, with Harvick and Martin across the line, Bowyer’s car had gone sideways, and that, NASCAR said, was when officials decided to throw the caution.
Trouble was, there’d been lots of wrecking in the moments before Bowyer went sideways. NASCAR’s response, spokesman Ramsey Poston said, was that “the vehicles that were in the earlier part of the incident were already off the track and on the apron.”
The wrecking had started early enough off Turn 4 that Martin fully expected Kyle Busch to be behind him, giving him a push coming to the flag. But Busch had detonated the final wreck, taking out Matt Kenseth, who’d been pushing Harvick up alongside Martin.
Martin hugged the bottom of the track coming off the corner and regained the lead.
“I was still ahead when they were wrecking behind,” he said. “And if they’d just thrown the yellow, [the win] was in our fingers. But they waited, and waited, and waited.”
They waited just long enough to put Martin right alongside Johnny Beauchamp atop the list of most uncertain near misses ever in the Daytona 500.
– – –
Doubling his pleasure
Kevin Harvick is the fourth driver in the last 20 years to win the Daytona Busch Series race and Daytona 500 on the same weekend:
YR, DRIVER, CAR
2007 Kevin Harvick Chevrolet
2004 Dale Earnhardt Jr. Chevrolet
1989 Darrell Waltrip Chevrolet
1988 Bobby Allison Buick
———-
ehinton@tribune.com
