There are five possible days this week when you could say the NASCAR season “starts.” The first of those is tonight, when the Busch Clash fires off the Cup Series portion of Speedweeks.
It’s an exhibition race, so we won’t really be recapping it, but if you like watching racing, it’s fun. 21 drivers this year (invitations are based on a variety of criteria, many of which are tied to having won the pole for a race last year—Busch sponsors the pole award, which is how this all ties in). 15 of them were in the playoffs last season (Clint Bowyer retired). The other six aren’t the biggest names, which is to say Bubba Wallace didn’t qualify, but they’re close: Tyler Reddick. Erik Jones. Ryan Newman. Chris Buescher. Ty Dillon (who’ll be driving Wallace’s car). Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
The race is on the road course at Daytona, so it shouldn’t be as chaotic as last year’s, when condensing a superspeedway race into 88 laps and making it an exhibition led to twelve of the eighteen drivers crashing out of the race. It should still be chaotic, though, as it’s still an exhibition and it’s only 35 laps. FS1 has the broadcast, and per NBC Sports’s preview, “The command to start engines will be given by The Busch Guy at 7:02 p.m.” What a NASCAR sentence. Anyway that’s eastern time I assume.
You could also make the case that the NASCAR season starts tomorrow night, which is when the Daytona 500 qualifying process begins.
Daytona 500 qualifying is unique. There’s the normal, single-car time trial qualifying tomorrow night, but only the first two spots in the field are determined by it. The rest of the field lines up based on results in the Duels, a pair of races Thursday night. So tomorrow night’s qualifying is, for the two fastest cars, their ticket onto the front line on Sunday, and, for the other cars, their ticket into where they’ll start the Duels on Thursday.
If you get all your NASCAR coverage from The Barking Crow, know that we won’t be recapping the Busch Clash tomorrow, but we’ll lump it in on Thursday with our preview of the Duels. So you’ll know if anything noteworthy happened.
Vroom vroom.
