Daytona 500 recap: Kurt Busch kick starts NASCAR’s new era with ‘Monster’ win

It’s supposed to be a race, but on Sunday, the Daytona 500 turned more into a slugfest where the winner’s car looked destined to end up on a scrapheap, not Daytona International Speedway’s victory lane.

The carnage-filled race, NASCAR’s signature event, featured three wrecks that saw five or more cars collected -- including one totaling 17 cars, and another with 11. Even the winner wasn’t immune. As Kurt Busch celebrated the biggest single-race win of his career, he did so alongside a No. 41 car that had its lettering rubbed off on the side and the right front taped together.

“I’m thankful enough we didn’t have too much damage,” Busch said. “The nose was clean and the tail was clean. Yeah, the sides were a bit wrinkled up. You just kind of let the rough edges drag and you go for it.”

It was a wild, topsy-turvy, sometimes maddening, and ultimately entertaining race. Precisely what NASCAR needed following an offseason where the entire industry focused its attention, and much consternating, on television ratings, attendance, and ways to enhance a product badly needing a jolt.

And that Busch was one of the central figures who helped introduce NASCAR’s new Cup Series entitlement sponsor, Monster Energy, to the sport, fittingly made him the winner of the chaotic Daytona 500 -- even if he only led one lap, the last one.

“They are a strong, big company and they have chosen to be the entitlement sponsor and I can’t be happier to do the job I am supposed to do as a Monster athlete, which is to win podiums and races,” Busch said. “Here we are with the Daytona 500 trophy.”

The Monster era of NASCAR began ignominiously with the company having little branding around the 2.5-mile track leading into last weekend’s opening preliminaries. But the company promised it would amplify its presence heading into the Daytona 500 weekend, and it certainly did.

There were stunt motorcyclists, its infamous scantily clad “Monster Girls” lined up next to every car on the grid, and on Sunday, even an appearance by Rob Gronkowski, who, well, did Rob Gronkowski things like make references to No. 69 and flirt with the aforementioned Monster Girls on national television. If Monster has a template on how it promotes itself, this was it.

If NASCAR wanted to become more fun, as NASCAR CEO and chairman Brian France insisted during Sunday’s drivers meeting, then its newest partner certainly did its part.

And on the track, NASCAR did so as well.

Drivers raced aggressively, running two-by-two for much of the afternoon and largely eschewing the single-file conga line that’s become quite prevalent in recent restrictor-plate races. There were the multiple car wrecks, though those tend to happen at Daytona, and none of which drivers said were a byproduct of the new segmented race format.

So while it may have been ugly at times, it did fulfill the fun quota.

“It was a pretty neat deal today,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “It felt like it was a new beginning of sorts for the sport; a new energy. It just felt good.”

Of course, none of this matters if NASCAR cannot stop its slow slide into irrelevancy, a path it’s been on for a decade.

Questions persist surrounding Monster’s long-term commitment to NASCAR, its financial commitment to national advertising, and whether it can find a way to market to its core demographic (millennials), but also the hardcore older NASCAR fan who once again is feeling marginalized. These questions won’t have definitive answers for months, maybe years.

Ideally, Sunday’s exciting race with a climactic ending would catapult NASCAR back into the mainstream American consciousness. Just as races from yesteryear did the same.

However, there is little evidence to suggest a rebound is afoot. It didn’t happen when Earnhardt won the Daytona 500 in 2014, nor the two subsequent years that also produced exciting finishes, including a record-close margin of victory.

NASCAR’s troubles are deep, and the Daytona Band-Aid simply won’t stop the bleeding. That much is clear.

But as Earnhardt suggested, Sunday could represent the dawn of a new era. And for one day anyway, that era felt like a lot of fun.