What’s So Great About the Great American Race

In sports, it’s no secret that traditionally, a league’s biggest event of the year is typically its last one.

It’s also no secret that those same principles are not true in NASCAR.

For as long as most fans remember, the Daytona 500 has been the kickoff event for one of the longest seasons in the country.

For more than 36 straight weeks, some of the most talented wheelmen in the world will duke it out while crisscrossing the country in haulers decked out with space-age technology.

That all starts this Sunday, though, with the Great American Race. But why?

To know Daytona is to know Bill France, the founder of NASCAR and father of Jim France, the company’s current CEO.

After moving to the Daytona area from Washington to escape the Great Depression, France eventually found himself running his own repair shop at 316 Main Street Station in Daytona Beach, Fla., a location that still stands to this day. A lifelong race fan, France dove head first into the motorsport culture in the area, particularly of the beachfront, land speed record sort.

However, the beach was becoming too rutted to hold drivers who wished to attempt such records. This led to a new focus: races.

Years passed, and France’s love for the sport grew. He began to host races himself on the Daytona sand. In 1950, Harold Brasington finished construction of his superspeedway in Darlington, S.C., and the Southern 500 was born. France had founded NASCAR by then and saw the popularity of Brasington’s track and event skyrocketing.

In 1959, after running, presiding over and watching many a race on the hard-packed sand of Daytona Beach and the adjacent highway, France’s magnum opus was completed. The 2.5 mile tri-oval that would later become the staple of the sport was finished.

NASCAR had its first two jewels in the crown that would become the spectacle that fans know today.

The first 500-mile race held at France’s new complex was in 1959 in front of a crowd of 41,921 spectators. Lee Petty won the inaugural race at France’s new motorsport haven and thus laid the foundation for the future of the sport. Attendance numbers between the new Daytona International Speedway and Darlington Raceway were bounced back and forth for decades after, and still are.

However, it wasn’t until 1982 that the race came to be the classic dosage of Americana that race fans know it as today. That was the first year that the Daytona 500 was the kickoff…