Daytona Speedweeks: Old meets new as NASCAR season cranks to life with Busch Clash

• Busch Clash gets it started.
• NASCAR hits the road in a big way this year.
• Brad Keselowski: "Nothing like the real thing."

DAYTONA BEACH — NASCAR’s annual season-opening bash at Daytona was already going to look different.

But ongoing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic saddled the Daytona events with additional new looks — cordoned-off parking areas, locked garage gates, spaced-out grandstand seating, etc.

And for good measure, they threw another curveball and extended the stay through another weekend of racing.

The end result is 10 automobile races, employing two very different tracks, between Tuesday and Feb. 21. One common holdover from Speedweeks past is the opening act: The Busch Clash, and even that changes this year.

NASCAR and Daytona International Speedway have taken the Clash off the famed 2.5-mile tri-oval and will turn it loose for 35 laps on a tweaked version of the Speedway’s road course that incorporates the tri-oval and multiple infield turns. That plan was announced early last March, pre-pandemic shutdowns.

The rest of the week will play out on the tri-oval, with Daytona 500 pole qualifying Wednesday night, and six races from Thursday through Sunday’s running of the 63rd annual “Great American Race.”

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The 500’s checkered flag normally signals the end of NASCAR’s Speedweeks, but the COVID Shuffle keeps NASCAR in town Feb. 19-21 for races — back on the road course — that were originally scheduled for Fontana but moved due to California’s stricter policies on crowds.

Daytona’s NASCAR road-course experiment, which began with a makeup race weekend last August, continues this month and gives way to a season that will include six other road courses for the big-league Cup Series, which had two road courses for decades and three for the past three years.

“The fans have spoken, they want additional road courses,” said NASCAR President Steve Phelps. “I think what they have said is they want schedule variation. They’ve been very loud and clear about schedule variation — our fans as well as our media partners. I’m stoked about it.”

While Tuesday’s Busch Clash will have a new look and feel, the race-day routine is all too familiar. In an effort to cut down on exposure risks upon restarting the season last May, NASCAR adopted a spartan plan for its races.

No practice, no qualifying, just show up on race day and mash the gas. That continues into 2021, except for the balance of this week and a handful of other events later in the season.

While it’s not a perfect overlap, NASCAR teams and drivers use track/car simulators to create the proper mechanical setup for each track. Even without practice time, drivers are instantly quite familiar with the various layouts due to their hours on “the sim.”

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“We have all these fancy simulators and all that,” said veteran racer Brad Keselowski. “We dink around with those a little bit. There ain't nothing like the real thing, though, that's for sure.”

And nothing like turning laps at Daytona, NASCAR’s first mammoth speedway, located just a few miles west of where NASCAR went from concept to reality some 74 years ago.  

“The holy grail of our sport,” Keselowski calls it.

Yet, frankly, at this stage of the year, when winter’s slumber gives way to eight-cylinder thunderclaps, it doesn’t matter what city’s name is painted on the track’s walls.

“It's the first race of the year,” Keselowski said, “and it's a trophy.”