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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
It has been a few days since the checkered flag waved over Christopher Bell‘s victory at Phoenix International Raceway. From my social media timelines to my email inbox to that guy at the gym who always corners me by the water fountain (you know who you are), the post-PIR refrain has remained the same.
“Hey, man, that race sucked; didn’t it suck?”
After so many days stuck on racing reaction repeat, my refined response has landed squarely in one place, and it has been steered there after spending those days in constant communication with those who were behind the wheel for that race and those who prepared the cars that those drivers wheeled in that race. In fact, let’s let one those racers speak for me, via a text I received Tuesday afternoon.
“Damn, McGee, everybody got spoiled, didn’t they?”
Yes, Mr. NASCAR Racer who asked to remain anonymous, they did become spoiled. As did I. As did perhaps even the racers themselves. After all, this 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season opened with three consecutive crazy, unpredictable, nail-chewing finishes.
First, came a Daytona 500 that ended under yellow, but the field was so tight and convoluted that even the timing of that yellow came into question, as William Byron edged a field that was wrecking wildly just inches off his rear bumper. One week later, Daniel Suarez came out in front of a three-wide door-to-door-to-door photo finish with defending series champ Ryan Blaney and all-time legend Kyle Busch, winning by a tissue paper margin of .003 seconds, the third-closest finish recorded since NASCAR went to electronic timing and scoring 31 years ago. Even the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, never a bastion of memorable end-of-race moments, produced a Mission: Impossible-ish countdown of drama, as Kyle Larson, who looked as though he would stink up the show early, was forced to fend off Tyler Reddick, ultimately blocking his way to a .441-second win.
See? Spoiled rotten.
It wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was awesome. An entire month of awesome. But it was also like when you hit your favorite steakhouse buffet. Everything is so delicious, and on the surface, it seems as though that eating ecstasy will last forever. But no matter how delectable that steak and fried chicken and chocolate fountain might be, you know deep down that the end is always near. At some point, you’re going to end up hitting a bad batch of mac and cheese. Then again, is it actually bad, or was everything that came before it so amazing that your taste buds’ expectation level has exceeded reality? No matter what came next, it wasn’t going to be enough, even if Gordon Ramsay and Wolfgang Puck were suddenly back there in the kitchen of the Golden Corral.
“Did people see what Bell actually did? He went by me like he was driving for Red Bull!”
No, they didn’t, second anonymous texting NASCAR driver. Honestly, does anyone ever see what Bell does? I mean, he has almost won the past two championships and no one realizes it … but that’s another column for another day. What he did Sunday was take the race’s final green flag sitting 21st with 90 laps remaining and then sliced his way through the field to seize the lead with 40 laps to go. He won by a whopping 5.465 seconds.
Boring? Sure, by 2024 standards, it was boring. On my press box pal Jeff Gluck’s tell-all “Was it a good race?” poll, it scored a 40.2%, compared to 76.1 for Daytona, 77.8 for Vegas and 94.8 for Atlanta (the latter is the fourth-best score since he started compiling his numbers seven years ago).
But the reality is that by Phoenix standards, it was not a bad race. If you are old enough to have watched pretty much every Cup race at PIR since 1988, and I am, then you know that it was actually pretty standard PIR stuff. And if you want to really get real with all of this, then you have to also be willing to admit that a race with 10 lead changes among 6 drivers balanced with 6 caution flags for 40 of 312 laps — 13% of the race — feels like a description that you could copy/paste into the vast majority of Cup Series races run in the 1990s and 2000s. And race fans of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s would have looked at those numbers and believed that they had just witnessed one of the most thrilling events of the season.
Again, we have become a little bit spoiled. And to be clear, that’s OK. It is not our fault. Because for all of the consistent fan complaints about stage racing and still-new short track packages, those rules and regulations have also led to or are the result of giving us fans more of what we were screaming for more of not so long ago: race days electrified by more restarts and a schedule packed with more short tracks.
“You know, they can’t all be the 1979 Daytona 500 or the end of the movie ‘Cars.'”
Yes, third anonymous racer/texter, we do know that, but we also refuse to accept it. Call it the curse of the highlight era of sports, the hex of being able to call up the finishes of the all-time classics on our pocket computer search engines. The neverending mythology of the greatest finishes in stock car racing history is a gift. However, it also creates a lifetime of unreasonable checkered flag wishes and dreams.
There’s a reason that the Daytona 500s of 1976 and ’79 and the Firecracker 400s of 1976 and ’84 are so revered, and it goes beyond their obvious greatness. They also benefited from the fact that they contrasted so incredibly against all of the other races of that era at Daytona that everyone has since forgotten. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of them — heck, the overwhelming majority of those very races leading up to those day-saving finishes — would have been lucky to have scored a 40.2% on the Gluck scale.
“I have been fortunate to have been a part of some amazing finishes,” racer-turned-commentator Jeff “The Mayor” Burton said to me last year at Daytona, immediately bringing to my mind his side-by-side .051-second victory over Jeff Gordon at Richmond in 1998. “But then, when you went back and didn’t have that same finish, re-creating a once-in-a-lifetime finish, people were like, ‘Well, what happened? That was boring!’ Living up to those moments all the time, that’s impossible.”
The next stop on the schedule has long been the mountaintop of impossible expectations, the bull ring carved into the actual mountains of East Tennessee. Bristol Motor Speedway has brought us Dale Earnhardt vs. Terry Labonte, Episodes I and II, aka “Terry’s Wrecked Win” and the “Rattle His Cage” race. It has also gifted us with wrecks and fights and water bottles bounced off of Hall of Fame faces. But when every single race wasn’t able to match up with that greatest hits highlight reel, what had been NASCAR’s arguably most beloved racetrack suffered from an inexplicable identity crisis. The fabled ticket wait-list vanished. The track was reconfigured, repaved and even covered with red clay.
Many have attempted to explain it, from legendary racing promoters to university economists, but the reason is simple. It’s because every race didn’t end like Dale and Terry in ’95 and ’99.
The good news is that Bristol’s perception has finally and rightfully been restored in recent years. The better news is that we have this problem at all. That’s because you can’t become spoiled unless there was a lot of awesome that happened to spoil you in the first place. Fans didn’t have this issue back in the day. It was quite the opposite. They were numbed by spending so many of their Sunday afternoons watching races they’d already forgotten about by Monday morning, as cars won races not by fractions of seconds but by multiple laps.
So, sure, call us spoiled. I’ll take that, complaining about being bored every now and then instead of most the time, over what I grew up with, which was going to sleep for the middle 250 laps and then watching Dale Jarrett or Jeff Gordon do what Christopher Bell just did, but 30 times a year.
Hang on, I have another text from another driver who wants the final word.
“All we can do is drive our asses off and what happens is what happens. Hopefully, that’s enough for everyone.”