NASCAR received its spotlight end of the season on Sunday evening in Atlanta.
Daniel Suarez’s win by mere inches over each Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch will assuredly be the closest end of 2024 because the three drivers hurtled three-wide to the end line. Suarez edged Blaney to the checkered flag by 0.003 seconds within the third-closest end in NASCAR historical past.
It was a compelling finish to what had been a pricey race for groups after an costly Daytona 500. Simply 4 of the 36 vehicles entered within the race weren’t concerned in a crash because the second race of the season picked up from the place the five hundred left off straight away. The race wasn’t even two laps previous when a 16-car crash — that included Suarez — broke out after Todd Gilliland slowed down to assist out his teammate Michael McDowell on the entrance of the sector.
General, there have been 10 cautions for 65 laps all through the 260-lap race. Suarez’s move for the win was the forty eighth lead change in these 260 laps.
In essence, the race went as NASCAR and Atlanta Motor Speedway hoped it might. There have been plenty of crashes. There have been plenty of lead adjustments. And there was a end that left many questioning who received within the seconds after Suarez crossed the end line.
Nevertheless it’s additionally price questioning what NASCAR and Atlanta really gained over the course of a race that after once more confirmed NASCAR’s willingness to push the road between leisure and sport.
This was precisely the race that NASCAR and Atlanta needed when the 1.5-mile observe was redesigned forward of the 2022 season. Previous to that, vehicles would get unfold out as drivers used each inch of the pavement on the worn-out Atlanta floor. However forward of the 2022 season, the observe raised the banking and narrowed the racing groove. The end result: the adjustments to the observe coupled with NASCAR’s tweaks to the principles that ruled the vehicles on the observe all of a sudden made Atlanta a mini Daytona or Talladega.
The final 5 races on the previous Atlanta format produced 24 cautions and 92 lead adjustments with a lot of these lead adjustments coming from green-flag pit cease cycles. Within the 5 races for the reason that observe has been reworked, there have been 46 cautions and 159 lead adjustments.
That purposeful change from one excessive to a different could make it laborious to actually respect the standard of the end that occurred on Sunday evening. Years in the past, Atlanta had been identified for shut finishes like between Dale Earnhardt and Bobby Labonte in 2000 and Kevin Harvick over Jeff Gordon in 2001. However these finishes got here in an period the place vehicles weren’t artificially tethered collectively through the draft and aerodynamic guidelines like Atlanta races presently are.
This model of Atlanta is a bit like a bag of Cheetos. They are often good and addicting however are additionally in the end unfulfilling and have little dietary worth. There’s nothing improper with having Cheetos every now and then. However you in all probability shouldn’t eat them every single day.
The identical precept applies to the kind of racing that now unfolds at Atlanta. So long as different intermediate tracks don’t comply with swimsuit and begin renovations to duplicate what Atlanta has carried out, there’s room on NASCAR’s marathon 36-race Cup Sequence schedule for 2 races a yr at Atlanta even if you happen to’re not a fan of the kind of racing it produces.
What Atlanta can’t be, nonetheless, is the brand new intermediate observe commonplace. It’s crucial that NASCAR doesn’t get blinded by Atlanta’s highlights in its determined bid to return to mainstream relevance and attempt to mimic this sort of racing on the six different intermediate tracks on the schedule.
In any case, NASCAR survived and thrived for many years with drivers routinely profitable races by appreciable margins. And people blowout wins made the shut finishes all of the extra sweeter.
