Culture
The Daytona 500 is NASCAR's Super Bowl, so why doesn't it always equal greatness?
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon won the Daytona 500 twice in his first seven seasons, later adding another victory six years later, in 2005. Surely, he figured, there would be more to come.
Then Gordon never won NASCAR’s biggest race again.
“You get into this frustration of, ‘Man, what am I doing differently?’” Gordon said.
The answer, oddly enough, was nothing.
Such is the nature of this crown jewel NASCAR race, which represents a unique contrast in the realm of top sporting events: It is NASCAR’s Super Bowl in so many ways, but also remains one of the least reliable indicators of greatness.
Some of NASCAR’s most legendary names, like Tony Stewart, Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin, never won this race. Meanwhile, five of the last seven Daytona 500 victors have gone winless in that season’s remaining 35 events.
“You would assume in the biggest race of the year, the best teams and drivers would always win,” said Joey Logano, the 2015 Daytona 500 winner. “But it’s not like that.”
Logano brought the fastest car to this year’s 500, qualifying on the pole position there for the first time in his career. But the style of racing at NASCAR’s so-called “superspeedways” like Daytona means there are no guarantees Logano will have a good performance in the race, when well over three-quarters of the field has a legitimate chance to win. (The race, originally scheduled for Sunday, has been postponed to Monday at 4 p.m. ET due to rain.)
The reason is rooted in safety concerns. If NASCAR Cup Series cars were allowed to travel around Daytona’s high-banked, 2.5-mile course without restrictions, they could top 200 mph and put both competitors and fans at increased risk.
By requiring each car to have a “tapered spacer” — a hole-filled aluminum block that reduces the airflow to the engines — NASCAR limits speeds to try and keep cars from getting airborne and flying into (or through) the fences that separate the fans from the racetrack.
But there’s a side effect. The reduced horsepower means cars typically travel in giant packs, and drivers must rely on help from other competitors to draft around the track. Otherwise, they risk falling helplessly behind, unable to catch up as the field races off into the distance.
That makes the odds rise dramatically on two fronts: One, unheralded underdogs can hang with the elite long enough to pull off a shocking win; and two, even a slight bobble or mistake by one driver in the pack can trigger a large, multi-car crash known as “The Big One.”
“You’re not going to be fully in control of your destiny, and I’ve just accepted that,” said defending NASCAR champion Ryan Blaney, who has never won the Daytona 500 despite being one of the best superspeedway racers. “I’m going to do my best to try and stick around this thing, and if I get wiped out in something that’s not my fault, it’s like, ‘What can you do?’”
When Christopher Bell won Thursday night’s Daytona 500 qualifying race, he acknowledged a belief this style of racing was “100 percent luck.”
In reality, that’s an exaggeration. While luck undoubtedly plays a factor at Daytona, it’s not everything.
“I used to think this race was more luck than skill, but as I’ve studied more, the same guys are always up front,” said Kyle Larson, who is known as one of the most talented American drivers of his generation. “Those guys are not luckier than everybody else; they’re really talented when it comes to this style and they’ve got a good sense of how things work and where to be at the right time.”
Austin Cindric won the Daytona 500 in 2022, his only Cup Series win in 79 races. “The drivers who win this are the ones who remain calm and make good decisions,” fellow driver Tyler Reddick says. (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
Becoming a top superspeedway racer requires a different skill set than typical tracks, which are more about drivers getting their car to handle better (and thus go faster) than the competition.
At Daytona, the best drivers have both excellent racecraft — knowing when to risk a move and when to stay put — and an innate sense of avoiding danger. Combined with those things, they also need savvy strategy calls from their teams, quick pit stops from their crews and, of course, good fortune.
“The smart ones can navigate through (the danger) or know, ‘I need to get out of this’ — or they’re already ahead of it to begin with,” said Tyler Reddick, who has crashed in all five of his Daytona 500 starts but won his Thursday qualifying race. “The drivers who win this are the ones who remain calm and make good decisions with the race approaching the end.”
Though the late Dale Earnhardt Sr. was mythically said to be able to “see the air,” the reality of modern-day drivers is they must see the video. Along with their spotters, who narrate and even dictate which moves should be made from positions high above the track, drivers pore over film of previous races to understand which moves work, which ones backfire and which ones cause major crashes.
Some teams track analytics, like the best running positions in the pack that correlate to success. But even then, there are still so many elements out of their control.
Brad Keselowski, for example, has led the most laps in each of the last two Daytona 500s — part of 177 career laps led in this race — but has never won it. Now 40 and running out of time to claim a Daytona 500 crown, Keselowski said he’d trade leading those laps in exchange for leading the last one.
“You go to the Daytona 500, and you’ve done all this preparation work … and more often than not, the result feels unearned either way,” he said. “Like many things in life, you just have to recognize it’s not always fair and accept it and move on. But it’s difficult to reconcile, for sure.”
Keselowski, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. are among the current Cup Series champion drivers nearing the end of their careers without a Daytona 500 victory. Busch has said he badly wants to win the 500 more than any other remaining accomplishment, but also acknowledged “it’s just one race.”
Drivers throughout the NASCAR garage continue to wrestle with that dichotomy; as Gordon said, “somebody is going to win this race, and there’s no other win like it.”
On the other hand, as Logano noted, a Daytona 500 trophy — or lack thereof — doesn’t define a driver’s career.
“It’s an unbelievable stat to have on your resume,” Logano said. “That part is fantastic. But if you had to decide between winning 15 Cup races over one Daytona 500, you’d probably rather win 15 Cup races.”
GO DEEPER
Daytona 500 lineup: Ranking all 40 drivers on their chances to win
(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Jared C. Tilton, Jonathan Ferrey, Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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