Now, there’s two of them.
Everything that Austin Hill has mastered on superspeedways has been passed down to Jesse Love. So even on a night where Hill suffered a rear gear failure and didn’t make it to the finish, Richard Childress Racing was once again inevitable on Saturday night in the NASCAR Xfinity Series opener at Daytona International Speedway.
Hill only made it to Lap 80 before having to call it a night.
Thus, it would be easy to have expected Love to have been out to lunch when needing to fend off Haas Factory Team drivers Sam Mayer and Sheldon Creed. As it turns out, regardless of who is driving them, not even a pair of Haas Factory drivers had anything for even one second year Richard Childress Racing driver.
“Anyone else, you can get to their quarter panel and clear them,” Creed said. “Everyone else is just more equal. They can just do whatever they want to anyone they want to. They have the best cars and they’re really fast. I wanted to go take control. I didn’t want them to have control because I could see how fast they were. It was always going to come down to a two-lap, lap and a half like this.”
And Mayer agreed.
“You can plan all you want, be prepared all you want but these guys are racers and everyone has brought their A-game,” Mayer said.
To a certain extent, Hill or Love, it didn’t matter because these races run through Richard Childress Racing.
“Obviously our cars are really fast and we have a lot of power under the hood and get good fuel mileage,” Love said. “But I credit a lot of it is to Austin. He has helped me a ton. At this time last year I really knew nothing … but Austin was an open book for me for the first months of leading up to Daytona last year, and obviously that shortened my learning curve a lot.
“I was a rookie last year at the speedways, but I had a wealth of knowledge because of him, and I have three pages of notes that he wrote for me to look over before I come to these racetracks. He’s the best at it. There’s nobody better than him at this package.”
Xfinity supremacy
The ending of the race notwithstanding, where it devolved into a series of result-altering crashes, the Xfinity Series remains the best platform in NASCAR everywhere it gets taken.
When Denny Hamlin talks about what Cup Series superspeedways races used to be, this is what he means.
The pack gets spread out and allows drivers to make moves. There’s a greater amount of disparity and while that doesn’t sound like a good thing on paper, it also makes the races less random and therefore more legitimate.
For example, what Richard Childress Racing is doing right now is akin to the Dale Earnhardt Inc. dominance of superspeedways races in the 2000s. That was the peak of NASCAR’s popularity and the sport was hurting very little for having those races run through Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Michael Waltrip.
ARCA’s Big Personality
By most every metric, the ARCA race at Daytona was a disaster, and NASCAR got over the air FOX to put that crashfest on broadcast television too.
However, introducing NASCAR fans to race winner Brenden Queen and having popular YouTuber ‘Cleetus McFarland’ introduce his fans to the sport were all significant wins.
FOX and NASCAR seemed to recognize this too, inviting McFarland, real name Garrett Mitchell, into the broadcast booth for the second half of the race. The race was not particularly flattering but McFarland has tremendous reach to people who are not inherently NASCAR fans and his contributions were a net positive.
He spent all day and night after the race just hamming it up with race fans.
He’s got a lot of work to go, and sporting integrity matters here, but ‘Cleetus’ wants to race in the Daytona 500 by 2027 and based on the reaction to him on Saturday, it would have an additive effect on the sport should he earn that right.
Meanwhile, Daytona learned about the legend of Brenden ‘Butterbean’ Queen, the mullet bearing, Waffle House soliciting, nut who also won the most prestigious short track championship in the country last year when he won in the CARS Tour for Lee Pulliam Performance.
At 27-years-old, Queen is old by prospect standards but only recently broke out into the mainstream with some additional sponsorship support to make a serious NASCAR run a reality.
Like ‘Cleetus,’ Queen was the life of the party after the race and the authenticity connected with race fans interested in something or someone new.
Even if the racing product was awful on Saturday, it did create two new potential stars for NASCAR in the coming years, even if their ceiling are fundamentally different.