The motorcade snakes its way out of the pits and onto the track, leading the field. “The Beast,” as the Fox Sports booth excitedly keeps calling it, pussyfoots its way around Daytona, running along the apron instead of maintaining some real speed on the high banks. A press car bursting with paparazzi runs in front. The booth calls down to President Trump, telling him the radio is his, and he can say whatever he wants to the crowd and the millions of people at home. There’s silence. Only the distant rumble of fortysomething V8s a half-mile back on track can be heard. A minute goes by, a full trip around the tri-oval. They call him again, “Mr. President, the radio is yours.” “This is your favorite president. I’m a big fan,” he says. “I’m a really big fan of… you people, how you do this, I don’t know.” A rain delay or two later after only running a dozen or so laps in the green, and Air Force One will have departed, leaving everyone to do nothing but sit there for hours talking about how cool they thought all of that was despite nothing happening at all.
It was a pathetic display befitting of the sport—a politician only a sycophant could love making the some of the most noncommittal pageantry I’ve ever seen on a professional racetrack, giving a half-hearted start to the “Great American Race,” one which is defined by the ever-growing idiocrasy of its spectacle as much as its rich history. NASCAR has been on a decline paralleling that of its parent country, with all the tweaks being put on it to give it back the illusion of the greatness it once had—the worse and worse car generations, the stage cautions that make the races feel pointless in aggregate, and the playoffs system which does the same for the whole damned season—these aren’t that far off from the Band-Aids that keep getting put over the broken American system rather than fixing fundamental issues. Now the American Band-Aids are getting ripped off, with Trump’s Shadow President Musk letting it bleed out so that he can buy up the remaining pieces for personal control.
It’s a classic early-stage fascist move, but instead of a good manufacturer like Daimler-Benz all of a sudden becoming the main supplier for Nazi hardware, we’ve got the State Department buying up $400,000,000 of an overpriced piece-of-shit triangle of a car designed by the top divorced man in the country for all the other resentful divorced men who are too embarrassed to sleep on the couch, so they’d rather cuddle up in the bed of their electric truck. It’s the loser era in America, one where if you roll your McLaren F1 because you can’t handle gunning-it in a rear-wheel drive V12 with 620 bhp and walk away from it, you get to become king of the car industry and then king of the country.
NASCAR too is in its losers-as-winners era. For most of the 2025 500, it looked like 2024’s champion Joey Logano was going to unfortunately clinch the win. Even more so than Jimmie Johnson, Logano has become the king of walking backwards into a title, securing his third last year in his most undeserving season yet, where the fucked playoffs system rewards late-season luck rather than year-wide performance. Logano got spun-out in one of the biggest wrecks of the night by an equally terroristic driver, Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., collecting eight other cars with them on lap 186 of 200. Ten laps later, another over-aggressive lunatic, Cole Custer, pushed his from second in the top lane into Christopher Bell, rocking him into the wall and down the line before he collided with Ryan Preece, sending his Mustang flying through the air at 200 miles an hour (poor Preece can’t help but get flipped at Daytona). Then for the icing on the Daytona cake, Custer would follow Austin Cindric around Denny Hamlin on the overtime restart. Cindric and Hamlin would go back and forth for the lead, with Cindric grabbing the white flag before Hamlin would get him from the outside on the back straight. Custer goes three-wide to Hamlin’s right, makes the move, and turns them both; the evolving incident forcing Cindric off to the apron, too. All of a sudden, William Byron runs to the front and takes the checker, making it back-to-back Daytona victories for himself.
There’s a good claim that NASCAR is the great American sport, not because of its heights, but its follies. Like the country, it’s a parody of what it once was, and its ridiculousness would be funny if it wasn’t so dispiriting. Non-motorsports fans and racing diehards alike have always accused the predominantly oval-running series of “just turning left” and being boring and unskilled because of it. While I think there’s a real beauty to the sport, one that flows like a violent river of gasoline and rubber, I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the changes made to how the spectacle works have left it bereft of strategy, intensity, and meaning. Resetting the field twice at the start of “stages” to get a big, dramatic green flag go as many times as possible in the race kills the spontaneity of the sport and the formerly-important long game. Not to mention, it really only makes the last third important to watch if you care about who wins. While it seems like plenty of sponsors and partners are still cashing in, the act of watching it has been reduced to little more than watching a parade of outdated tech taking its last fossil-fueled breaths in sunsetting circles.