Welcome to 2024. NASCAR’s off-season is brief and this season came at us fast. The new season finds us in a familiar place of perfect anticipation, but also at odds with Mother Nature and with a few brand new questions.
In the interest of getting a few pages of notes off my desk before the engines fire off, here are a few things I’m cleaning out of the racing drawer to kick off another season.
First of all, let’s talk about the rain. We’re exactly two race weekends into the NASCAR season and, including the NASCAR-owned ARCA Menards Series, four of five races have been rescheduled due to rain. Only the Craftsman Truck Series race at Daytona International Speedway has run on its scheduled day and time.
The Busch Light Clash, originally supposed to roll off on Feb. 4, got moved up a day due to strong storms that were forecast to hit southern California at the originally scheduled race time. Faced with possibly having to wait until Wednesday to race, NASCAR squeezed the event in a day early and got out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum without trouble.
Two weeks later at Daytona, the Cup Series got off to a good start, with qualifying runs on Wednesday (Feb. 14) and the twin qualifier races on Thursday (Feb. 15) rolling off as scheduled. The trucks also saw no last-minute adjustments to the docket, racing Friday night as advertised. That night turned into a doubleheader when the ARCA event was moved from Saturday (Feb. 17) as a wet forecast loomed.
Xfinity Series qualifying miraculously took place on Saturday, but then the skies opened for the next 36 hours, forcing both the Xfinity Series United Rentals 300 and Sunday’s (Feb. 18) Daytona 500 to be slotted in for a Monday doubleheader.
It’s not what anyone wants. Teams and fans alike scramble to change flights and extend hotel stays. A lot of fans don’t have the luxury of staying and missing a day of work, so will have to miss the race altogether. NASCAR doesn’t make these decisions without thinking of the teams or fans, but there’s no way it can please everyone short of controlling the weather.
We can talk about schedule changes, but even if the season opened at Phoenix Raceway or Las Vegas Motor Speedway, they have to go back to the east coast after that. And yes, it still rains in Daytona and Atlanta in March (though the forecast in Atlanta looks good so far).
It is true that some weather problems could be avoided with earlier start times,…
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