I was driving home last night right at 7 o'clock, and there was still enough light in the western sky to frame some ragamuffin clouds. That's how I knew spring was more than rumor.
It hits 7 p.m. in these parts and it's still not full dark, that's about all the good you get from the hellscape of February. It's the month when you first hear the chirp of a bird or notice the angle of the sun is different -- or become aware, dimly, that twilight is dawdling a bit more than it did a month or even a week ago.
It's also the month when a bunch of loudmouth muscle cars bellow for your attention down in Florida, which for the Blob has always been a first robin deal.
The muscle isn't all Detroit iron now, but that hardly matters. Tomorrow a pile of that iron comes braying to the green in the Daytona 500, and the Blob will settle in for four hours of the only stock car racing it ever watches anymore.
I suppose this puts me in a demographic NASCAR doesn't like to think about, even as it obsessively thinks about it: People who've just lost interest in the product.
Part of it's generational; the sport is still feeling the retirement of Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jimmie Johnson and several more of the old guard with whom America grew comfortable across the last quarter century. Chase Elliott? Ross Chastain? Christopher Bell? William Byron?
Who are these guys, anyway?
And why, a week or so ago, were they racing on a temporary oval around the inside of the Coliseum in Los Angeles?
This was the latest attempt by NASCAR to re-gin up its product, and it illustrates the vicious circle in which the sport finds itself. The more market share, attendance and viewership dwindle, the more NASCAR tries new stuff, and the more new stuff it tries the more it feels like Hail Mary gimmickry. Races in football stadiums! Races on dirt (the Food City Dirt Race at Bristol)! Street races (the street race in Chicago on Fourth of July weekend)!
Shoot. They're even bringing back North Wilkesboro, an iconic old ghost NASCAR abandoned 27 years ago because the sport had supposedly outgrown it.
Now NASCAR's come crawling back, scheduling the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro the weekend of May 19-21.
As for Daytona tomorrow ...
Well, as usual, the Blob has no clue who wins it. This is partly because it can't tell the players without a scorecard anymore, but mostly because it's a plate race and no one can predict a plate race.
Count on it coming down to the guy who gets the right push at the right time while the inevitable multi-car pileup happens behind him. Last year that guy was rookie Austin Cindric, son of Penske team president Tim Cindric. He didn't win another race all season and put up just five top five finishes and nine top 10s in the 35 remaining races.
In other words: Past performance does not guarantee future results when it comes to the Daytona 500. Outliers win as often as not, and they can come from anywhere. Cindric, for example, started 21st last year.
This year he starts sixth, outside of Row 3. Alex Bowman starts on the pole. Neither of these things mean very much.
That's because the winner will probably be someone else. William Byron, maybe. Ross Chastain. Bubba Wallace or Ryan Blaney or Chase Elliott or Brad Keselowksi, a 16-year Cup veteran who's won a lot of stuff but never the Daytona 500.
I'll pick him, in that case. Because why not?
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