FAREWELL, FIRECRACKER: Daytona’s summertime NASCAR race on the move
By ken.willis@news-jrnl.comPosted Jun 29, 2019 at 10:39 PM Updated Jun 29, 2019 at 10:40 PM
After 61 years parked in early July, next year’s 2020 400-miler will be run on Aug. 29.
When Aug. 29, 2020 rolls around and NASCAR throws the switch on Daytona’s summertime 400-miler, things will likely look and feel as they have for most of the past 60 years. Especially the past 20-plus years of nighttime racing here.
It’ll be hot, the skies might be threatening, drivers will be leery of a big crash. The overriding vibe, however, will be decidedly different.
Goodbye, flag-inspired bikini. So long, Uncle Sam tank-top.
“The 29th of August” just doesn’t bring the same inspiration as Fourth of July weekend.
“July in Daytona” has been part of NASCAR since 1959. It changed twice in a big way: In 1988 when the race was moved from July 4 to the first Saturday in July, and in 1998 when it was moved to nighttime after the installation of lights at the Speedway.
Through the first half of its 60-year existence, the race had “Firecracker” in its title and the engines cranked on July 4 at either 10 or 11 a.m. The race would end before lunch got cold and, soon thereafter, almost everyone would be in the waves.
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“At 2 o’clock, we’d be at the beach,” says longtime racer Jimmy Means, who ran 17 July races at Daytona between 1976-93. “I have a picture of me holding my son (Brad) on the pier when he was 6 weeks old. He’s 42 now.”
NASCAR’s schedule, in earlier years, often had the Firecracker race sitting in the middle of a lengthy mid-season break. Sometimes there were two weekends off before and after the 400.
That type of respite disappeared as the schedule grew from a low of 29 races to today’s 36 (38 if you count the two exhibitions) and as the TV partners began requesting and/or dictating scheduling needs.
This week at the Speedway
Thursday
1:05-1:55 p.m.: Xfinity Series practice
2:05-2:55: Cup Series practice
3:05-3:55: Xfinity Series practice
4:05-4:55: Cup Series practice
Friday
3:35 p.m.: Xfinity Series qualifying
5:05: Cup Series qualifying
7:30: Circle K Firecracker 250 Xfinity Series race
Saturday
7:30 p.m.: 61st annual Coke Zero Sugar 400
‒ More information: DaytonaInternationalSpeedway.com
Throw in the 21st century revamping of NASCAR’s championship protocol, as well as blanket network coverage, and the current desire to reverse the downward trend in attendance and TV ratings, and you get this: The final July edition of Daytona’s summertime thriller, currently known as the Coke Zero Sugar 400.
In the first big effort to shuffle the scheduling landscape, the 400 leaves its mid-season, Fourth of July-themed home to become the 26th race on a 36-race schedule. Next year, it will be the final race of NASCAR’s 26-race regular season and will officially set the table for the 10-race playoffs.
A lot of tradition will be stuffed in the moving van, as will boxes and boxes of memories.
‘The only ocean’
“The Fourth of July, that’s where I always thought that race should stay,” says Geoff Bodine, a NASCAR regular from 1982-2000. “We loved it that way. We’d bring the (two) boys down, stay at the beach, go swimming. You’d get out in that surf ... man, that was good exercise. And it was nice that time of year; the water was warm.
“We liked it so much, we ended up buying a condo there,” adds Bodine, who now lives about 90 minutes south in Malabar.
Eddie Wood, second-generation owner of the famed Wood Brothers Racing, believes he was 10 years old, in 1962, when he first tagged along to Daytona in July with his father, the late NASCAR Hall of Famer Glen Wood, whose race team was born and based in tiny Stuart, Virginia.
Marvin Panch, who moved to this area during his racing career, was driving the Wood Brothers car that year, and Eddie Wood remembers seeing the ocean for the first time as he hit the surf with Panch’s kids, Marvette and Richie. But another 1962 “first” stuck with Wood just as much.
“I got introduced to Steak ’n Shake down there in ’62,” Wood says. “I was an instant fan. I was big on the burgers and fries, and I always go back when we’re down there and eat the same thing now that I’d eat then. That one stuck with me.”
Eddie Wood first saw an ocean here, but his contemporary Kyle Petty can top that.
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“I was born on June 2 (1960) and we were in Daytona for the race in July. We just went; that’s what we always did,” says Petty. “I’ve joked about this, but I was quite a bit older before I realized that the only beach in America wasn’t in Daytona Beach. That was the only ocean we ever saw. Once a year, we’d see the ocean. And I thought that was the only one.”
Richard Petty and wife Lynda would pack their four kids into the station wagon and leave North Carolina for Daytona Beach each summer. Given the open schedule on both sides of the Firecracker, it’d turn into a family vacation, headquartered at different times at the Royal Beach and Sea Dip hotels on the beach.
Richard, from 1959 forward, would always celebrate his July 2 birthday in Daytona Beach.
Every year at some point, family remembers recall, Richard would get the tops of his wide feet sunburned and have to painfully shove them into his racing boots the next day at the track. At any given time at the hotel, King Richard could look around and see lots of familiar faces — David Pearson, Bobby and Donnie Allison, as well as other drivers and their families.
“The Sea Dip was where I learned to swim,” Kyle Petty recalls. “I also remember that Donnie Allison was a diving phenomenon. He’d come back from the racetrack in the afternoon, and we’d all be mesmerized by his diving — full gainers, half-gainers ... he was a diving fool.”
Over time, as bigger money and wider fame came to NASCAR, drivers found it more convenient to stay in their luxury motorcoaches at the racetracks each week, fenced off from the fans and light years away from the old way of doing things.
“We loved it the way it was,” says Bodine. “I ended up living down here in Florida, which tells you how much I liked it.”