First off, let me just apologize for not being very present on the site lately, but I’ve been trying to fend off an amazingly stubborn case of the flu.
Anyway, it lifted enough yesterday for me to catch most of the Daytona 500.
The 500 is, more or less, the start of the racing season (I know, a case could definitely be made for either the Daytona 24 hour race, or the Rally Monte Carlo being the start), and this time around it was won by Ryan Newman.
It was a good race overall … real clean for the first 180 of 200 laps, and then there were many, many incidents that threatened to see the race finish under yellow, or that odd green/white/checker that NASCAR cooked up a while back.
Newman races for Roger Penske, and believe it or not, this is Penske’s first Daytona 500 win.
That’s ironic on a number of levels, but the most interesting is that if anyone can be “credited” with making racing the corporate friendly marketing vehicle that it is today, it’s Roger.
I understand that for Roger, having a rather bland and publicly controlled driver is just part of his personality, like his obsessive need to have things spotlessly clean.
The downside seems to be that other team owners picked up on this as being THE way to insure success on the track. So these days you see a lot of bland, beige drivers who are hired because of their speed first, and their ability to fit into a boardroom PowerPoint presentation a close second, especially in the NASCAR ranks.
To me, Tony Stewart seems like fairly normal for a racer from when I was growing up, and calling Kurt Busch “a rebel” makes as much sense as calling the food you get at Chili’s “Mexican”.
Anyway, congratulations to Ryan Newman, Roger Penske and the whole crew on their first 500 win.
Now let’s see what the rest of the season brings us.
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