NASCAR: 5 positive storylines nobody could have predicted

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Joey Logano, Team Penske, NASCAR (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) /

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Homestead-Miami Speedway hosted the NASCAR Cup Series season finale since the 2002 season, but in March of last year, the 2020 schedule was released, and it was revealed that it would be Phoenix Raceway hosting the 2020 season finale.

Phoenix Raceway is right on the border of what is considered a short track at 1.022 miles in length, and in the first year of the new rules package last year, short track racing was a disappointment.

The races at the four-turn oval in Avondale, Arizona left a lot to be desired, and there was initially a lot of concern that the 2020 championship race would be insanely dull to the point where it would only remain in the desert for one year.

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But in the offseason between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, NASCAR made several tweaks to the rules package for the races at the six short ovals and the three road courses.

These six short ovals are Bristol Motor Speedway, Dover International Speedway, Martinsville Speedway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Phoenix Raceway and Richmond Raceway, and these three road courses are Sonoma Raceway, Watkins Glen International and the Charlotte Motor Speedway roval

The race at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, March 8 was the fourth race of the season and the first race at any of these tracks, and it did not disappoint.

Team Penske’s Joey Logano held off Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick by 0.276 seconds to win a race that featured 20 lead changes, which no race at Phoenix Raceway had featured since November of 2013 when Harvick won a race that featured 23.

Additionally, this race was far from a straight-forward race, as there were 12 caution flag periods. The only other race at the track that had featured 12 caution flag periods since the track began hosting Cup Series races in 1988 was the race in November of 2014, which Harvick also won.

The fact that this is still the most recent race has made it the one that fans have thought most about over the last month or so — ironically, just like the actual season finale would do during the offseason — and many thoughts about it have been positive, a rarity in modern-day NASCAR. The difference is that the current “offseason” was not planned and has no set end date.

In essence, we could get two “season finales” at Phoenix Raceway in one year, and with the current rules package for the track, is there anyone who wouldn’t want to see what we saw in March again in November?

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As awful as the current situation is, there are still good things that have come out of it. Hopefully we can all come out of it in the very near future, and NASCAR racing, along with everything else in the world, can return to normalcy as soon as possible. For more information about COVID-19, visit the CDC’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.

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