Each winter we hear of two Super Bowls–the one that really is, and the one that really isn’t.
The Daytona 500, some NASCAR drivers will tell you ad nauseam, is “our Super Bowl.”
It is not.
After Super Bowl XXXVII next Sunday, there’ll be no doubt who is champion of the NFL.
After the 45th Daytona 500 on Feb. 16, there’ll be no clue who’ll win the Winston Cup.
The season-opening 500 isn’t even a typical NASCAR race. The rules and equipment are vastly different from those that govern 32 of the 36 races each year.
That’s because the playing field here is an aberration.
The NFL does not place 20-pound weights around the ankles of all “skill” players, stifling their ability, just for the Super Bowl. NASCAR mandates carburetor restrictor plates that cut horsepower almost in half for the Daytona 500.
There is no reason to anticipate the NFL changing the rules between now and Sunday. There is every reason to anticipate NASCAR changing the rules between now and Feb. 16. Last year the rules were tweaked repeatedly, right into race week.
Four-time NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon said during testing here last week that he won’t know whether his stable of Chevrolet Monte Carlos will be competitive this season until “I go to Las Vegas” for testing on a 1.5-mile track that is far nearer a standard playing field on the tour than is 2.5-mile Daytona.
How well he runs on the more sensible tracks is, he said, “all I really care about.”
“It is the Daytona 500,” he acknowledged, “and we all want to win the biggest race. But I still want to win a championship. And I know that winning a championship consists of being good at the majority of the tracks.”
Only four “plate races” are run each year–two here, two at Daytona’s sister in obsolescence, 2.66-mile Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway.
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Current Winston Cup champion Tony Stewart recently called his Daytona test sessions “three days of just playing around, I guess.”
And Stewart is living proof of Daytona 500’s insignificance toward the championship. He fell out of last year’s race after only two laps, finished dead last and left here 43rd in the standings.
Only once in the restrictor-plate era (1988 to present) has a driver won the 500 and gone on to the season championship. That was Gordon in ’97. Before that, nobody had done it since Cale Yarborough in ’77.
Defending 500 champion Ward Burton won but one other race last season. The late Dale Earnhardt, called by NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. the league’s “best driver ever,” won seven championships and 76 races, but only one Daytona 500.
The race became NASCAR’s showcase event largely due to its dead-of-winter date, when there’s nothing else going on but the humdrum regular seasons of basketball and hockey. And because the 500 is so tradition-bound to February (its roots go back to the Winter Speed Carnival of 1903 on Daytona Beach), it is doomed never to join the Super Bowl as the grand finale of a championship season.
As big yet aberrant as it is, the Daytona 500 has become a distraction, an impediment, a strategic waste of time to teams whose overriding goal is the championship. They spend all winter preparing for this race, then veer off to a steady diet of normal tracks before the next restrictor-plate race, at Talladega in April.
So call Daytona what it is–a big show, a grand happening, a lovely tradition, a big and prestigious payoff for any driver.
But don’t call it a Super Bowl. That’s a term for a championship event.