Editor’s note: NASCAR driver Regan Smith, who’s behind the wheel of the Denver-based Furniture Row Racing team’s No. 78 car, is writing a daily diary this week for The Denver Post about the Daytona 500.
DAYTONA BEACH, fla. — From my standpoint the only good news is that the 2012 Daytona 500 is finally in the history books. I think most of the Sprint Cup drivers would agree with me.
We finished 24th, but had a much better Furniture Row Chevrolet than what the final result showed. As happens so many times at a superspeedway event, all heck breaks loose when the race gets close to the checkered flag. And you just hope that you’re not one of the teams involved in a multicar melee.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the case for us. With 12 laps remaining, and charging to the front, I got collected in a seven-car pile-up. The front-end of my car was torn up and by the time I made a third unscheduled pit stop for repairs, the crew was left with no choice but to tear off the battered hood. I drove the hoodless car for the remaining laps and was severely handicapped.
We just didn’t take advantage of our great race car. At the beginning of the race, I ran up front, led laps and I could put the No. 78 Chevy anywhere I wanted. It was that good. But a subpar pit stop on Lap 58 of 200 knocked us to the rear of the field, which took away our momentum.
I managed to get close to the front again as the race was winding down, but when I got shuffled out of the draft, I was right in the middle of the pack, a vulnerable position in the closing stages of a restrictor-plate race. We were in the danger zone and sure enough we got caught up in someone else’s mess.
I felt if we could avoid the wrecks late in the race, we had the potential of at least a top-10 finish.
How about that jet dryer incident which caused NASCAR to red-flag the race for more than two hours? During a caution, Juan Pablo Montoya’s race car ran into a jet dryer which caused nearly 200 gallons of flammable jet fuel to spill onto the track. The flames, the sparks — it was more like the Fourth of July race in Daytona.
I have never seen anything like that in my career and I am willing to bet that no one else has either. It was spectacular, no question about that. The lengthy red flag did knock the wind out of our sails, but recently you’ve come to expect the unexpected at the Daytona 500.
It’s been a long Speedweeks and we need to recharge our batteries and get focused for this weekend’s Cup race in Phoenix. So much effort is put into the Daytona 500, but you have to keep in mind that it pays the same amount of points as the other 35 Sprint Cup races.
