Derrike Cope’s win in the 1990 Daytona 500 is among the most unusual upsets in NASCAR history. Not only was it one of just two career Cup Series wins for Cope, he was also one of only two drivers with fewer than 10 career top-level NASCAR race wins to win the Great American Race from 1971 to 2000. The other driver who did that? AJ Foyt. And there’s a serious argument that he’s the single greatest racing driver ever.
That 1971 to 2000 run—begun when the race itself was 12 years old—made the Daytona 500 the greatest single-race prize in stock car racing. In the 25 years since, nine different drivers with fewer than ten career wins have won the Daytona 500. And that harsh shift in who wins the race has radically altered the significance of NASCAR’s greatest prize.
The modern arbitrary pattern started with the three races run between 2001 and 2003, even though they don’t represent the era’s typical pack racing. Michael Waltrip won the first with a one-year rule package that created more chaotic racing than usual. In the second, eventual winner Ward Burton only led on the final restart with three laps to go because leader Sterling Marlin got out of his car and attempted to repair a pushed-in fender under a red flag. In the third, Waltrip won again when the race was rained out.
Things really got strange in 2011, after Jamie McMurray became another upset winner in 2010. That was the year of so-called tandem drafting, a short-lived oddity where teams seemingly discovered all at once that running two cars nose-to-tail without any other cars around was more effective than a typical pack racing formation. Rookie Trevor Bayne took his only Cup Series win in that race, and NASCAR set about a still-ongoing shuffle of drafting power and downforce packages in order to bring back pack racing.
Over the 2010s, the race slowly teetered from a charmingly random crap shoot to a nonsensical one. Elite race winners became more rare, underdog winners became more common, and more races were decided by the timing of notorious “Big One” wrecks than ever before.
In the 2020s, pack racing is at its most ridiculous. Field-sweeping wrecks that became a regularity after the introduction of restrictor plates are as prevalent as ever, and they do not discriminate between more and less skilled drivers. Often, the driver that causes a wreck is the beneficiary. This was the case when Michael McDowell won the 2021 Daytona 500 with a poorly-timed and awkwardly-angled bump draft on Brad Keselowski the leaders headed into a corner, spinning Keselowski into his leading teammate Joey Logano and causing a massive crash. McDowell split the difference and emerged unharmed, leading his first lap of the night and grabbing his first-ever Cup Series win.
McDowell’s move was at least a mistake while trying to benefit from a push on a competitor. Another recent winner with a middling resume, Austin Dillon, won in more controversial fashion in 2018. Dillon had a run from second on the final lap when he was blocked to the inside by Aric Almirola. He responded by swinging over to the outside and right-hooking Almirola into the wall with what can most generously be described as a historically poor attempt at bump drafting. Less generously, it can be seen as an intentional move to wreck the leader and win at 200 mph.
NASCAR’s current drafting package encourages this randomness, and worse, its overtime rules encourage multiple late wrecks in the same race. Since a caution with anything less than one to go does not end the race, the event is often decided by a two-lap sprint. Urgent pack racing then leads to more crashes, and that two-lap sprint is often cut short by yet another crash on the final lap.
In the past, winners felt less random in part because they were more directly responsible for their own race wins. Now, the timing of those cautions is too often what decides who wins and who loses. Each of the last five Daytona 500s has ended with a last-lap wreck. Three of those races ended with a caution thrown on the final lap before the finish line.
Last year, 13-time race winner William Byron became one of the more accomplished recent Daytona 500 winners. His win was decided entirely by the timing of a caution. Not only did the race only actually end on the yellow because the officials calling the caution did so late for a crash that started before the final lap, Byron was passed by teammate Alex Bowman shortly after the button was hit. A yellow any earlier forces another overtime finish, a yellow any later awards the win to his teammate. Additionally, Bowman and Byron teamed up to cause a massive crash when the pair made a mistake while bump drafting late in the race.
This sort of racing tarnishes what was once a highlight of the racing calendar. Huge packs passing at will are essential to the modern appeal of racing at Daytona, but modern pack racing on stock car racing’s biggest stage is less about the passing within those packs and more about where a driver is physically placed when things inevitably go bad at the end of the race. What used to be a 200-mph chess match is now a 200-mph lottery, one made worse by NASCAR’s own inane overtime rules.
Since closing down a backstretch grandstand and expanding the track’s main grandstand, NASCAR has had little issue selling out this race. Television ratings are another story. A table of historic ratings data hosted by Frontstretch shows that the race drew well over 11 million viewers in 2017 and earlier. The race still outperforms the average Cup Series event, but it has eclipsed 10 million viewers just once since. The last Daytona 500 not impacted by rain, held in 2023, was a new low watermark for the modern history of the race at 8.1 million viewers.
Compare the recent list of Daytona 500 winners to the lists of Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans winners, two long-standing, fabled, and illustrious events that are bigger than the category of racing they represent. Each has seen stretches of relatively weak winners (including an overlapping rough stretch in the late 1990s) in its century-long history, but the stretches have never lasted long. Because the driver, team, and manufacturer superstars of their series eventually got back to winning them, upset winners like Buddy Rice and the Walkinshaw Racing Porsche WSC-95 can retroactively be seen as underdogs that beat the odds rather than evidence that the odds never meant much in the first place.
Modern Daytona 500 results have the opposite effect. By making a Daytona 500 win a less significant marker of a great career, today’s NASCAR stars have one less way of differentiating themselves. Merely great drivers like Dale Jarrett and Sterling Marlin were able to stand toe-to-toe with titans like Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Jeff Gordon in part because they were so successful in this race. Modern master Denny Hamlin, by contrast, cannot really rest on the laurels of his three Daytona 500 wins in place of a championship.
A quick change can still save the prestige of the Great American Race, but another decade of racing randomness and does so little to showcase the skill of NASCAR’s top drivers could diminish the prestige and competitive reputation of the race. A NASCAR that decides its champion with an arcane format that emphasizes eliminations, points awarded mid-race, and special “playoff points” is unlikely to be a NASCAR that cares about this issue. This is a damn shame, because the Daytona 500 can and should be one of the best and most important races in the world.
Fred Smith’s love of cars comes from his fascination with auto racing. Unfortunately, that passion led him to daily drive a high-mileage, first-year Porsche Panamera. He is still thinking about the last lap of the 2011 Indianapolis 500.
