FOX has been showing a NASCAR promo in recent weeks billing this as potentially the “best season ever.” You may have seen it during some NFL playoff games. You might be confused, or at least not understand pieces of it. In case you are, here’s what to know, scene by scene:
Denny Hamlin has won back-to-back Daytona 500’s.
He was also one of the best drivers in the series last year, finishing fourth after spending most of the first 34 (of 36) races in second place in the standings. He’s evidently marketable outside of the sport, too, judging by those Papa John’s pajama commercials.
Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick are both good at this.
Harvick had the better 2020, leading the standings up until the penultimate race. Logano won the cup in 2018, is significantly younger than Harvick and Hamlin, but isn’t as young as the new guard. So both these guys get to be in the promo (in case you’re wondering, Brad Keselowski was the biggest snub from the ad, unless I missed him in which case someone else was the biggest snub).
Chase Elliott is the reigning champion and the Most Popular Driver.
Yes, Most Popular Driver is an actual award. Elliott’s been winning it since Dale Earnhardt Jr. retired. 25 years old, son of former champion Bill Elliott, and aw-shucksy while still having the Jimmie Johnson appealing-to-soccer-parents thing going, NASCAR should probably be putting a lot of chips in Chase Elliott’s basket.
Austin’s on the schedule this year.
There’s a speedway here in Austin called Circuit of the Americas. Formula One and IndyCar race there, along with a few other series (also you can evidently ride your bike around the track sometimes, which is fun because it’s so smooth, according to a Lyft passenger of mine), but it’s new for NASCAR. Being in Austin, it’s a destination-weekend race. Being a road course, they’re making a push for TV viewership since it isn’t the standard oval some folks like to make fun of.
NASCAR moved its Throwback Weekend to Mother’s Day.
Darlington’s an old, classic track, so it hosts the Throwback race every year, in which you get retro paint schemes. Darlington’s on the schedule twice this year for the first time in a while (excluding last year, when NASCAR was just trying to get races in for a bit there), and it kicks off the playoffs in September, so instead of having the September race be the Throwback one, it’s been moved to Mother’s Day, probably to make an angle for nostalgia?
Clint Bowyer is joining Jeff Gordon in the booth, which is funny because they got in a fight in 2012.
It was a good fight. Both teams involved. Great clip of Bowyer splinting towards Gordon’s hauler.
NASCAR’s trying a dirt race, and they’re trying it at Bristol.
Bristol’s a blast of a track because it’s real small (only half a mile) and pretty high-banked, which leads to some good crashes, so it was a little surprising that NASCAR decided to use it for the series’s first dirt race in 51 years—basically, it’s exciting already. But some contractual constraints and an evident desire by Bristol to try to amp up its own attendance made the dirt thing happen there, rather than at another track (if you want to learn a lot more about the reasoning behind the decision, this is a good article).
The format for the race hasn’t been announced yet. Dirt events typically revolve around shorter intervals of racing—heat races, to boil it down simply—because the track needs upkeep. In other words, don’t expect a normal long-haul dirt race. Expect shorter heats culminating in a main event. This, even without the dirt, might provide some excitement, so maybe having the Bristol name as an added boost will be enough to get this on PTI and that sort of scene. We’ll see.
Also, for the sake of understanding the commercial: That’s Ryan Blaney smelling the dirt. He’s buddies with Elliott, he’s buddies with Bubba Wallace, and he’s not as good as Elliott but he’s pretty good. His dad was a NASCAR driver and his grandpa was a great dirt track racer, so that—in addition to him being able to pull off the folksy shtick, presumably because it isn’t much of a shtick for him—is probably why he got the nod.
Michael Jordan started a NASCAR team.
This was pretty big sports-wide news when it was announced. MJ and Hamlin, who are friends, started a team together. Bubba Wallace will be the driver. It should be the best car Wallace has driven (Wallace’s former employer, Richard Petty Motorsports, doesn’t put out as good of cars as Joe Gibbs Racing, with whom 23XI Racing has a technical alliance—no disrespect to Petty, of course, just a resource thing). There’s a lot of hope this helps bring mainstream sports fans and Black fans onboard to NASCAR, just as Wallace brought those demographics onboard this past summer.
Kyle Busch is an asshole, but in the best way.
That dude quoting Marshawn Lynch is Kyle Busch. He won the cup in 2019 (also in 2015), and he’s ornery. NASCAR likes casting him as a villain, but he’s not as much of a villain as Logano in actuality, for reasons Busch probably described best himself. I think it was on Pardon My Take a couple years back when he said, and I’m paraphrasing: On the track, I’m an asshole. Off the track, I’m an asshole. On the track, Logano’s an asshole. Off the track, he pretends he’s this nice guy.
So putting Busch in the lovably ornery setting and sarcastically calling him the “all-time fan favorite” is a reference not to him being popular, like Elliott, but a reference to him being popular to hate.
Will this season be the best ever?
Probably not, but it could be one in which some mainstream relevance is achieved. And that’d be a big victory for our favorite nationally touring stock car series.
