DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — In its zeal to reclaim an eroding fan base with its highly touted “back to basics” approach to stock-car racing, NASCAR overlooked one very basic thing: a track that didn’t erode during its marquee event.
The season-opening Daytona 500 was halted twice Sunday, for a total of 2 hours and 23 minutes so track workers could patch potholes in the surface of Daytona International Speedway — a calamity that nearly overshadowed Jamie McMurray’s improbable victory in a wild scramble on the final lap more than 6 hours after the race began.
McMurray, who lost his job at the end of last season, spun his Chevrolet in smoke-spewing circles of glee on the frontstretch grass after taking the checkered flag, then hopped out to grab the flag as a memento and dropped to his knees, buried his helmeted head in the grass and pounded the ground.
“It’s unreal,” McMurray said, breaking down in tears in Victory Lane. “It’s a dream.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. staged a thrilling show of his own, rallying from 10th to second over the final 10 laps of mayhem. Greg Biffle came home third.
“When I saw the 88 (Earnhardt Jr.) behind me, I thought, ‘Oh no!’ ” McMurray said. “Earnhardts — they win all the time at Daytona!”
But the fiasco of the fissures that erupted between the speedway’s first and second turns, and the failure to fix them in a timely manner, amounted to a huge black eye on NASCAR’s biggest occasion — equivalent to the NFL halting the Super Bowl in the fourth quarter because a goalpost collapsed and taking 2 hours to right it.
In an interview during the first delay, Brian France, NASCAR’s chief executive, told Fox broadcasters that soggy conditions and unseasonably cold weather were preventing the typical patching compounds from setting.
“Normally we would have had it resolved a lot quicker,” France said. “That is the problem. The good news is we will get it solved.”
After a 1-hour 41-minute halt to the action, the racing resumed with 78 laps to go, but the patching job didn’t hold. So after 36 more laps of racing, officials red-flagged the race again, ordering drivers to bring their cars down pit road and park them one more time.
Earnhardt Jr. had joked during the first delay that NASCAR officials should just put orange cones over the track’s gashes and tell drivers to dodge them as they whipped around the 2 1/2-mile oval at 190 mph.
