Kevin Harvick won NASCAR’s return to racing Sunday at Darlington. But we won too.
Kevin Harvick found Victory Lane at Darlington Raceway Sunday afternoon in the Real Heroes 400.
But to a larger extent, everyone who loves sports also found a small victory.
NASCAR’s first race back after a 10-week sabbatical due to the coronavirus could have gone wrong in a lot of ways. Instead, it served as a symbol that things can still go right.
It was an undeniably strange race. There was no practice, no qualifying and, most weirdly, no fans. The main broadcast crew called the race remotely, 95 miles away in Charlotte.
But it worked.
Not perfectly, but well enough. And that bodes well for the ambitious schedule NASCAR has plotted — one that includes another Cup race at Darlington on Wednesday night, followed by two Cup races (both also without fans) at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday and May 27th.
In terms of actual drama, the race was a bit of a snooze. Harvick led more than half of the 293 laps and sailed to victory after holding off Alex Bowman on the final restart. Harvick, 44, has now won 50 times in the Cup series, the same number of victories as racing legends Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett.
One of the best moments came when Harvick did the traditional doughnuts in front of exactly nobody at the start-finish line and then climbed out of his racecar to face a TV camera.
“I didn’t think it was going to be that much different,” Harvick said, looking back toward the empty grandstands. “And then we won the race — and it’s dead silent out here.”
Oh, it was different. The pre-race images were full of drivers, race officials and pit crews wearing masks. Regan Smith, the former NASCAR driver and on-site reporter, worked hard running around the pits gathering interviews and kept his own mask on the whole time. During his post-race interview, Harvick gave an eloquent shout-out to Dr. Josh Hughes, a Charlotte emergency medicine physician whose name was written on Harvick’s car.
The race sounded more or less the same on TV, but it didn’t look the same. Especially at the beginning, the empty stands were jarring.
There were a whole lot of people watching at home for this one, due in part to curiosity and a lack of live sports competition.
And if this race had gone sideways — and it could have in any number of ways related to COVID-19 — it would have been a body blow for the idea of a return to sports in general.
Due to its lack of physical contact, NASCAR is supposed to be relatively easy to restart compared to football, baseball, basketball and the rest.
So we needed this to be successful. We needed it to be mostly about the racing. We needed to let COVID-19 be pushed into the background for a little while.
The Fox broadcasting crew certainly tried to help with that. Mike Joy and Jeff Gordon seemed determined not to even say the word “coronavirus” for hours at a time once the race began, although the commercials were never going to let you forget this “uncertain time” we’re all living in.
Once the racing actually got started, it didn’t look that different.
There were untimely wrecks — Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on the very first lap, Jimmie Johnson just before he was going to win the first stage.
There was the requisite moment of levity — the wall wrapping for Blue-Emu, the pain cream, started peeling off one of the track walls after some cars scraped it. Some of the wrapping got stuck in the grill of two different cars, causing what was undoubtedly NASCAR’s first emu-related caution flag.
There was the part in the middle of the race where I got bored and went to go find some food. I couldn’t be at the press box for this race — the access for writers was far too limited at the South Carolina track — so I went to my own refrigerator. Still, the same idea.
For almost all of it, there was an air of welcome normalcy. A Sunday drive on a sunny May afternoon — we all know what that feels like.
After so many things we aren’t used to seeing over the past 10 weeks, here was something that we knew. A race on in the background, part of the weekend’s soundtrack. It felt like home, which is what sports at their best are supposed to feel like.
Who cares if the race itself wasn’t that great? They finished the thing. And we’ve got a lot more sports trying to figure out how to mimic what NASCAR did Sunday — safely.
Kevin Harvick won Sunday. But so did we.
This story was originally published May 17, 2020 at 9:12 PM.
