Will There Ever Be a Normal Daytona 500 Finish?

Every year, the Daytona 500 rolls around to start the NASCAR Cup Series season, and every year it feels like a massive letdown.

Each race begins to live up to the hype, and the Daytona 460 is one of the most thrilling races on the calendar. But time and time again, it’s the final 20 laps and change that wreak havoc on the field and turn the battle for the Harley J. Earl Trophy into a game of drunken Russian roulette.

Monday’s (Feb. 19) Daytona 500 finish was far from the most egregious or controversial in the last decade, but it became yet another statistic in a sad trend of caution flags deciding the winner instead of checkered flags. 

To find a Daytona 500 that ended at lap 200, ended under green and didn’t have a last-lap crash (regardless of whether or not it brought out a yellow), you’d have to go all the way back to 2017 — seven years ago.

The 500 in its current state like a game of Jenga; the first 180 laps are the process of building the tower. But as the aggression, blocks and desperation moves pick up, something has to give. The Big One occurs, and the tower collapses like a house of cards. And once the tower has collapsed, the desperate attempts to rebuild it will only lead to it collapsing again.

Big wrecks and battles of attrition have been the expectations at both Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway for a good 30-plus years, but the Daytona 500’s accident-prone finishes border on ridiculous in the last two decades.

Twelve of the 20 Daytona 500s in the overtime era went longer than 200 laps (60%). The 2009 race was rain shortened, which means that just seven of the last 20 Daytona 500s have ended at the magic mark of 500 laps and 200 miles.

Of the seven that ended at lap 200, three of them…