There’s been some growing support this year for ditching NASCAR’s playoff system — returning to the pre-2004 method of determining the champ through a season-long points race.
NBC and partner USA broadcast the last 14 races of the season, including the current 10-race playoffs, and it’s hard to imagine them going along with that idea.
You’re also unlikely to get old-school support from the marketing folks at Daytona International Speedway, where the usual drama is dramatically ramped up due to the added importance of the Coke Zero Sugar 400.
Daytona’s summertime race, an early-July fixture from 1959-2019, moved to late August in 2020 and, with one exception, has become anchored to the final race slot of the 26-race regular season.
Daytona’s technical rules, designed to keep the cars at relatively sane speeds, also equalize the field and make the track susceptible to surprise winners. For all the detractors of this form of racing, Daytona is the perfect place to end the regular season and provide one last opportunity for longshot racers to get the win they need to secure a playoff berth.
Daytona’s summertime race has always been “the other race” here, given how the season-opening Daytona 500 remains NASCAR’s biggest-by-far individual race. Take away the playoff implications, and the 400-miler becomes just another race on the trail — a white-knuckler, sure, but just another race.
But chances are, it’d survive just fine. It has a history of adapting.
In the beginning, NASCAR had other summer plans for Daytona
The ability of Daytona to adapt its summer race plans dates back to the Speedway’s infancy. After the track’s 1959 opening and February’s debut of the Daytona 500, plans for the summer included a Fourth of July Indy-car race, but first, there’d be an April shakedown.
Like the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Daytona measured 2½ miles, but while Indy is largely flat, racing’s newest monster track included hulking turns banked at 31 degrees. The Indy-style cars were fast — very fast, over 170 mph — but unstable. A.J. Foyt compared it to riding on the wing of an airplane.
Two 40-lap races were scheduled, and on Lap 40 of the first, Indy-racing regular George Amick crashed violently and died instantly. The reality was too obvious to ignore — those cars weren’t ready for 31-degree banking and speeds some 30 mph faster than Indy’s Brickyard.
NASCAR president and Daytona Speedway builder Bill France Sr., needing a race and the ticket sales it would generate, jostled the 1959 schedule and added a second NASCAR race to Daytona’s calendar, planting it on the Fourth of July.
A race initially slated for Raleigh, N.C., would instead become the first Firecracker 250, a 100-lapper featuring most of the NASCAR stars who’d christened the Daytona 500 in February.
That change came on the fly. Others would unfold, slowly at first, but eventually changes began coming with regularity as the Firecracker 250 arrived and thrived and this coming week celebrates its 67th running.
Early editions of the original Firecracker 250 would last a little over an hour and a half. It’d start in late-morning and end in time for race-day visitors (including many drivers and their families) to pack a lunch and hit the beach.
That routine continued, but it became a later lunch in 1963 when the race was lengthened to 160 laps and 400 miles, where it remains today.
Well, that’s the plan, anyway, but it doesn’t always hold up. NASCAR brought overtime finishes to the Cup Series in 2004 in order to guarantee green-flag finishes. Twelve times since then, the race has been extended beyond 160 laps, including in 2011 when David Ragan took the checkers at the end of the 10th overtime lap.
And several other times, it took the green a day late due to rain.
Daytona’s summer race changed sodas from Pepsi to Coke
Their numbers are fading, but you occasionally come across someone who calls this one the Firecracker. Yes, time flies, but believe it or not, the Firecracker has carried a soda label for 40 years now.
Here’s the rundown …
1959-1962: Firecracker 250.
1963-84: Firecracker 400.
1985-88: Pepsi Firecracker 400.
1989-2004: Pepsi 400.
2005-17: Coke Zero 400 Powered by Coca Cola.
2018-2025: Coke Zero Sugar 400.
The first change — to Pepsi Firecracker 400 — lasted just four years because everyone except the marketing folks still called it the Firecracker. Many of those same people were a bit stunned 15 years later when Coca Cola replaced Pepsi as race sponsor, and stunned again three years later when Coke replaced Pepsi as the official soft drink of Daytona.
Pepsi had been one of the original big-name, deep-pocketed corporations that helped Bill France finance the Speedway in the late-’50s, and the relationship seemed forever locked in. Well, they did wait until 16 years after Big Bill’s passing.
Coke, you may recall (and as the chronology above suggests), did its own rebranding several years ago with its second “diet” soda. Coke Zero didn’t exactly tell the story the brand was wanting to tell, so it became Coke Zero Sugar to drive home the point that, you know, there’s no real sugar in there.
So now the 400 seems settled comfortably into its role as last-ditch chance to not only send a longshot to Victory Lane, but into the upcoming Cup playoffs.
It happened just a year ago when Harrison Burton got his first win of the year and, in fact, the first of his career.
Several capable drivers and teams are still searching for a 2025 victory. And some others, like Burton last August, could also make Daytona’s summertime nail-biter a career-first Cup Series trophy.
Here’s a list of racers — some very familiar — who made the Firecracker/Pepsi/Coke 400 their first NASCAR win: A.J. Foyt (1964), Sam McQuagg (1966), Greg Sacks (1985), Jimmy Spencer (1994), John Andretti (1997), Greg Biffle (2003), David Ragan (2011), Aric Almirola (2014), Erik Jones (2018), Justin Haley (2019), William Byron (2020) and Burton last year.
So yes, there’s a history of such things.
— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
