Halfway bonus spicing up Daytona 500
By Ryan McGee
ESPN The Magazine
It is 1972 and NASCAR race weekend, any race weekend.
Dave Marcis, a Wisconsin racer who has sunk his personal bank account into the crazy dream of coming south to compete in NASCAR's cutthroat Grand National Series, has unhooked his 2-year-old No. 2 Dodge from the trailer hitch and has gathered his team to discuss the weekend's race strategy. They are in T-shirts and jeans and unless you define a salary as having one's lunch paid for, they are all volunteers.
"Here's the plan," Marcis explains to his very loose definition of a crew. "We could qualify Friday, in the first round, but we aren't. I'm going to sandbag today so that we can be fastest in second-round qualifying tomorrow and get that $500 bonus."
"What about Sunday, Dave?"
"There's no way in hell we can win on Sunday. I can't afford the tires and, no offense, but you guys are a terrible pit crew. But I can tell you what we are going to do. We're going to race our hind ends off and get that halfway money."
"Halfway money?"
"Yeah, that's the bonus check they give to the guy who leads the middle lap of the race. Try to keep up …"
Richard Petty raced for the halfway money ("You're darn right we did," The King said late last week). Dale Earnhardt raced for the halfway money ("Heck yeah we did," longtime crew member Chocolate Myers said on Monday). So did Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Darrell Waltrip (Recalled DW: "I can still hear Junior Johnson coming over the radio and saying, 'Go up 'ere an' git that money.'").
For decades NASCAR racers realized they were one lap from halfway and gunned it to the front in search of the check -- be it $500, $1,000 or $10,000 -- that sponsors put up for being first at the point when the crossed flags were shown.
After the 2006 season the halfway money program, then titled the Bank of America Card Service Mid-Race Leader, was discontinued. Now it will be returning for one race only. It just happens to be the biggest race of them all, the Daytona 500. And now the check is a little larger.
"Two hundred grand," said team owner Tommy Baldwin. "That's a lot of money. We can go do some serious racing with that kind of money."
The promoter and his promotion
It was this past Thursday, Feb. 2, when Daytona International Speedway announced that it would be posting a record $19 million purse for the 54th running of the Great American Race, with at least $1.4 million guaranteed to the winner.
But in the days since, none of that has been the hot topic among NASCAR fans in chat rooms, on message boards and on radio call-in shows. Instead it has been nonstop chatter about the Daytona 500 Mid-Race Leader Award, which will hand two hundred large to the driver who is leading when the field crosses the start-finish line at the end of Lap 100. (If that lap is completed under caution then the cash will go to the driver who leads the fifth consecutive green flag lap after that caution has been lifted.)
The loudest segment of those fans claims that the bonus money is unnecessary and even unsafe. Some members of the media have agreed with them. Others shrug it off as an in-race promotion that will be forgotten as soon as the Daytona 500 begins. At the very least they laugh at those who don't realize that halfway money is far from a new idea.
Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
Joie Chitwood III knows how to get people talking about his race, the Daytona 500.
Joie Chitwood III hears them all. And he hopes to keep hearing from them all the way up to the green flag on Feb. 26.
"All I know is that they're talking," the track president said from his office on Monday afternoon. "As long as people are talking about the Daytona 500, then we're selling tickets for the Daytona 500. I don't think people are lining up to buy tickets to see who wins the mid-race money. But they're talking about our race. No way that's a bad thing."
Chitwood knows a little something about getting race fans riled up. He is, after all, a member of the famed Chitwood Thrill Show family who spent most of the 20th century upside down and on fire. By the time he was 5, Joie III was in the show, doing 180-degree spins in a clown car and by the time he was a teenager he was a full-on stuntman, from driving on two wheels to being the Human Battering Ram.
He also knows a little something about motorsports contingency plans. When the Indy Racing League was formed in 1996, one of Chitwood's earliest front office jobs was to calculate race purses and figure out who got what, which included adding up bonuses for everything from winner's circle programs to sponsor decal payouts to, yes, halfway money.
"Contingency plans are as old as racing itself," said the 42-year-old. "It goes back to my grandfather running sprint cars. You win the B-Main and get a little bonus check and move on to the A-Main. You get a bonus check for winning a pole or leading the most laps or even having a bad day. So a halfway bonus isn't anything new. If anything it's a tradition."
One year ago Chitwood gave out the same amount of bonus money, awarding $50,000 to the leaders at each quarter, Laps 50, 100, 150 and 200. But those checks translated into virtually zero buzz. So this year he approached NASCAR VP of competition Steve O'Donnell with the idea of combining those four smaller payouts into one big one and resurrecting halfway money. O'Donnell, a sucker for anything old school, approved. Now, nearly three full weeks ahead of the race, the promotion has already paid for itself in media coverage.
Then, sounding like the true track promoter he is, Chitwood added, "And you know what, if it keeps guys from hanging out at the back all day like we've seen with superspeedway races over the last several years, then I'm all for that, too."
Middle-Lap Madness
That eagerness to "race too hard" is at the root of the most common criticism of Chitwood's mid-race bonus plan. That concern is not without some surface logic, with visions of sudden banzai, last-lap-style three-wide racing as the end of the middle lap -- in the Daytona 500 Lap 100 -- approaches.
Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
Dave Blaney may go all out to get that No. 36 Tommy Baldwin Racing car to the front on Lap 100 of the Daytona 500.
But a look at the numbers on and around the halfway point of last year's four restrictor-plate races reveals one indisputable fact -- these guys can't race any harder than they already are.
In three of the four races -- Daytona in February, Talladega in April and October -- the driver who led at the crossed flags hadn't led the lap before and immediately lost the lead during the lap that followed. The four races averaged a mind-bending 72.7 lead changes per race, with a large wad of those coming around the halfway point.
At Talladega in April, Carl Edwards led the lap prior to the crossed flags, Mark Martin led when they were shown and promptly lost that lead to Paul Menard. In October, Kevin Harvick led the lap just before halfway, Jamie McMurray led at halfway and Matt Kenseth led the next lap after.
In last year's Daytona 500, Ryan Newman led Lap 97, Robby Gordon 98-99, Martin Truex Jr. 100 (halfway), McMurray 101, and Newman 102. And those are just the official lap leaders, scored as they were when they crossed the start-finish line, not the lead changes that took place during the time in between. (There were eight "overtime" laps were added to the '11 Daytona 500 for green-white-checkers, but that doesn't alter which lap is considered halfway.)
On Monday, the men who run NASCAR's Competition Department met with the national media to answer questions about the upcoming season. When asked if they might be sitting a little straighter in their Race Control chairs as the Daytona 500 halfway mark approached, they all laughed. Said one: "We can't sit up any straighter than we already are that entire race."
"It has our attention …"
Neither can NASCAR team owners, particularly those among the second and third tiers of the Sprint Cup garage, most of which are struggling to make ends meet. On Monday, Baldwin stopped short of saying that he and driver Dave Blaney would be laying out their prerace strategy with the halfway money in mind. But he also acknowledged very quickly that "the bonus pays more than it does to win most races" and "we might be willing to stretch it on some things that the bigger teams wouldn't be to take a shot." But he also quickly added, "Keep in mind it still does pay a lot more to win the race. No one's going to jeopardize that chance to win the halfway money."
Multiple owners, drivers and crew chiefs responded very similarly via a flurry of Monday texts, though a trend quickly revealed itself. Those living on the top rungs of the sport almost unfailingly referred to it as a "bonus." They each said they wouldn't plan their race around it, but if they were in position nearing Lap 100 they would certainly go for it.
Those further down the food chain were more pointed.
"It would be great to throw at the bottom line at the end of the year," one owner replied. "It really is a big deal. It's very appealing."
"We're trying to build something here, not just start-and-park," said another, noting that Robby Gordon missed the halfway lead by only one lap in last year's 500 and fellow independent Joe Nemechek barely missed in July's 400. "200K would change our entire year financially. We could hire back people we had to lay off."
Said another: "Yes sir, it has our attention."
For now, it has a lot of people's attention, good and bad. It's a discussion that seems likely to last until the cars finally hit the track late next week.
And that's exactly how Chitwood planned it.
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