Great crowd and entertaining race. Keene was impressive, reminded me of his dad out there in the SLM. Rogers had made his way up to third or so before his first punt from Brandon Booth going into 1. He went to the back for the first time and made his way thru. He was up amd down like a roller coaster all night but seemed to have a car that could hang with keene.The restarts and the high line really shake things up. 2nd and 3rd are screwed 1 and 4th are the places to be. Rogers got dumped again by booth on another restart and somehow came home second.
Lots of passing for what turned out to be a six car race!
Wish more cars would have made it but there probably would have been a ton of wrecks so it was ok by me.
This was a good race that appeared less interesting than it was. How can this be? The car count was too low. Although Rogers, Booth, Keene, Cope, Clouser and others raced each other hard, the fact that most of the track was empty gave the appearance that not much was going on. A race fan would see how good the battle was, but I don’t think our sport can win new fans when everyone stays in a little group and leaves most of the track unused. If only there were another 10 cars to fill up all that real estate.
I sat far down in turn one, and from there it looked like a decent crowd. With so many fans in town for Daytona, its frustrating that not more of them could be reached.
[QUOTE=Boneman;129577]This was a good race that appeared less interesting than it was. How can this be? The car count was too low. Although Rogers, Booth, Keene, Cope, Clouser and others raced each other hard, the fact that most of the track was empty gave the appearance that not much was going on. A race fan would see how good the battle was, but I don’t think our sport can win new fans when everyone stays in a little group and leaves most of the track unused. If only there were another 10 cars to fill up all that real estate.
I sat far down in turn one, and from there it looked like a decent crowd. With so many fans in town for Daytona, its frustrating that not more of them could be reached.[/QUOTE]
I wonder how many of the fans in Daytona for the NASCAR race even knew there was a race at New Smyrna? Or for that matter even knew there was a New Smyrna Speedway.
The 400 draws a completely different crowd than the 500. In February, the fans come from all over the world and make a racing vacation out of it.
The July race is very different. Most of the fans are ‘day-trippers’, largely coming from within a few hours drive. They don’t make a week out of it, maybe just a long weekend.
It’s a different group, and not many out of towners get here by Wednesday.
Back in the 90’s Volusia had a Nascar Busch race maybe the day before the Daytona 400, I went in 1993.Nascar no longer cares about the small tracks. Hickory , So Boston, Nashville , IRP and others are long gone from the schedule.
Volusia had a Busch race in 1992 and I remember the track coming apart so we left and came home before it was over with. They pre-sold the seats and we purchase our tickets early to sit on the top row and could not sit in them because they marked them off too small. Someone was sitting in their seat and both of our seats.