Gentlemen, Start Your Engines.

posted by Jaitu at 21:31

Last weekend marked the start of this year's NASCAR season at Daytona and true to my word I made the effort to watch the races. I watched the two mid-week qualifying Duel races, the Busch 300 mile race on Saturday and Sunday's 500 Mile Nextel Cup event. So far I have to say I'm enjoying it more than I expected. I'm starting to get to know some of the car and driver combinations and even understand some of the rules.

--- SPOILER ALERT ---

I put that spoiler alert there despite the fact that it's now Friday so there can't be too many people who don't already know the outcome of the race and are keen to keep it that way. The finish to the Daytona 500 was a fairly spectacular affair. After the best part of 500 miles a caution was called with around 6 laps left to run. The race was red flagged after a few more laps and the cars stopped on the circuit behind the pace car while debris was cleared. This meant the race would finish under what's referred to as a 'Green, White, Chequered' scenario. This basically means that the cars would run again, be shown the Green flag to restart racing, the next lap the White flag signifying the final lap and finally the Chequered flag and the end of the race. Normally if another caution is thrown during this time the race is immediately over and the order of the cars on track at the time of the Yellow (caution) flag being shown becomes the final placing.
On the final lap a handful of cars began an assault from the high lane. Kyle Busch moved up to try and halt their run but had fall back into the lower groove. It appears this unsettled the car on entry into the final corner and he put his left front wheel onto the apron of the track causing him to lose the car and trigger a large amount of carnage. Only the two cars ahead of him really escaped and NASCAR kept the race under Green flag conditions until they had completed their drag race to the line before throwing the caution. In amongst the chaos behind them Clint Bowyer in the O7 Jack Daniels car got flipped and crossed the line in 18th place on his roof and on fire. It was quite a finish to a very long race.

The clip below gives a quick recap followed by the Green, White, Chequered and ultimate melee.


On a not entirely unrelated note I also happened upon this clip while looking for the one above. I thought we didn't know how to deal with icy roads. You'd expect people in Portland to have a better idea of what to do.