Around the Track: Daytona

In his latest edition of Cingular's Around the Track, Jeff Burton talks about the mid-summer challenges of Daytona International Speedway during Saturday night's Pepsi 400.

I think Daytona in February and Daytona in July are really two different racetracks, though some of that, I think, has changed now that we race at night in the Pepsi 400.

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The track is much cooler at night than it is during the day, obviously. So a lot of the handling challenges you have in the daytime, when it's slicker, are offset by the cooler nighttime temperatures.

But handling is much more difficult at night, for the Fourth of July (weekend) race. It's much harder to get your car to drive well and you end up out of the throttle a lot more than you do in February.

Handling is very important at Daytona. It's important in February, especially the last two years there, when handling's been really, really big. But it's magnified for the Fourth of July race, because of the heat.

The biggest difference in qualifying at Daytona, this time, is that it's an impound race this time, so I would imagine the cars that are in the top-35 in points -- you won't even know how fast you're going to run until you're ready to run your qualifying lap.

What will happen is we'll work on race trim the whole time in practice, and I don't even know if we'll ever make a qualifying run.

I think we'll just work on our race setup, pay attention to that and get our car driving well, and then when it's time to qualify we'll just tape it up, put four tires on it and go qualify.

Whatever you've got will be what you've got.

There are a lot of tricks that we play at Daytona and Talladega for qualifying that we can't do anymore with the impound procedure. So it's really going to be interesting to see who qualifies well and who doesn't.

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Because we change hubs, we change spindles, we change greases in the transmission and rear end; we change motor oil -- we change so many things and it makes such a big difference at a plate race.

Because with the restrictor plate three horsepower is a big difference on the racetrack, whereas at a big racetrack where you're dealing with so much more horsepower, three horsepower really doesn't make that much of a difference.

So it's a big difference in horsepower at a plate race and it's going to be interesting to see who's going to be able to qualify well and who can't, based on not being able to do all the tricks.

But really, when you get right down to it, it's Daytona and where you qualify makes no difference -- although I will say that it makes more of a difference at Daytona than it will at Talladega later in the year.

At Talladega, you're three-wide for the whole race, while at Daytona we won't see that as much. We'll see much more single-file racing at Daytona during the Fourth of July race.

Track position will be important, but more on old tires. When you get on old tires and you really start losing grip, that's when track position is really important.

With drafting and all, you can make up a lot of ground in the first 15 or 20 laps of a run; so where you qualify does matter -- but it doesn't matter a lot.

The most noticeable thing from the seat of my Cingular Chevy, racing Daytona at night instead of in the daytime, is that it just makes the track a little grippier and a little more forgiving, because it is cooler.

Visibility is really good at Daytona, at night -- but overall it's really not that big of a difference, at all. It just makes the day, longer.

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At the end of the day, that's the biggest thing -- it just makes the day, longer; and you can't wait (for the race), because you have to wait all day to do the race.

That's the biggest difference, really -- in all honesty.

It's a little more grip than it used to be, but the cars are so much different than they used to be, when we ran during the daytime -- that's it hard to put a comparison to it.

But certainly there's more grip during the night than there is during the day.

One thing a lot of people notice at night anywhere -- not just at Daytona -- are the flashes from people's cameras.

You see light bulbs and flash bulbs and all that at the start of the race, when everybody's doing them at the same time -- like when we pull out on the racetrack and we're doing our pace laps, you can see them.

But once the race gets going you don't see those. But certainly when they're dropping the green flags it seems like there are a lot of lights.

But after that, you tend to tune those things out, you focus on what you're doing and you don't notice them that much any more.

There's one thing about coming to Daytona -- and that's the fact that people call it the halfway point of the season.

It's a great misconception that the Daytona race starts the second half of the season, because that is the furthest thing from the truth. We're like four races from the halfway point when we do the Pepsi 400.

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What is that, like, the 16th race of the season (actually, the 17th of 36)? And there are 36 races? I don't know why, or who decided one day that that was the midway point of the season.

But it's really not. And the way we're racing this year with our point system, it's really the first 26 races and then it's the last 10 races.

So it's two different seasons, and right now we're past halfway of the first season.

But you are going to start revisiting racetracks again. You don't visit tracks twice until you go to Daytona in July -- and hopefully when you get to Daytona you have built some momentum, where you feel like you can go back to Daytona and run better.

You feel like you can go back to Michigan and run better -- and to Pocono and Phoenix and Richmond and Charlotte. You feel like you can go back to those places for the second time and run better than you did the first time.

And I think it's more a mental mindset about that than it is actually a real numerical halfway -- because it's not numerically halfway.

But it does start the trend of going to racetracks for the second time.

Jeff Burton, driver of the No. 31 Cingular Chevrolet, will take fans Around the Track each race week during the 2005 Nextel Cup season.